Class Procedures and Reminders:
Please call me Laura! Since I am on a first-name basis with all of you, it makes sense for you to be on a first-name basis with me also. I'm not a professor (I'm an instructor), and the title "Dr." seems to me like it should belong to a medical doctor. Or, of course, to THE DOCTOR himself. Here's a direct link to the YouTube video.
Wednesday assignments. You have assignments due today, Wednesday, that will get you ready for the creative kinds of story re-telling you will be doing in this class. Please make sure you complete Wednesday's assignments today - and start on Thursday's assignments now if you can, too!
Ning posts. I'm still replying to the Introduction posts that people have shared at the Ning; if you did an Introduction post on Tuesday and didn't get a reply from me yet, I'll be sure to reply on Wednesday. My goal this week is to reply to everyone's Introduction posts, along with other posts at random, based on how much time I have. Then, at the end of the week, I'll assign everyone to "blog groups" so that you can start getting to know each other, reading and responding to each other's blog posts.
Class announcements. You should be reading the class announcements every day. If you did not read the Tuesday announcements, please make sure you do that now: Tuesday announcements. At the top of the announcements, you will find important information about the class itself. Then, farther down, you will find new links each day to online resources that might help you in this class and, I hope, introduce you to new stories from all around the world.
Subscribe to the announcements. It's also possible to subscribe to the announcements by email if you want to do that. The subscription email form is in the sidebar of this blog down towards the bottom. Just fill out the form, complete the captcha, and then reply to the verification email you'll receive (check your spam folder if you don't see the verification email show up promptly; OU email has a tendency to route the verification email into the spam folder).
Your announcements for the class. If you are involved in campus activities that you want me to publicize, please let me know. I'll be glad to include them here in the class announcements! Send me specific information about day-time-location, and also a link to a webpage or any additional online information you have about the group or activity.
The following items are for fun and exploration:
Featured Resource: Flickr Image Search. As you search for images to use in your blog posts (and, later, in your webpages) for this class, I highly recommend using Flickr as an image source. You can find so many fantastic images at Flickr, freely licensed for your re-use; it's easy to search Flickr for those freely licensed materials.
Featured Storybook: Magical Mermaid Tales. This lovely Storybook tells a mermaid story that is probably familiar to you (Andersen's "The Little Mermaid"), along with some mermaid stories you probably have never heard before! It also features an inanimate storyteller in the form of a magical seashell.
FREE Kindle eBook: Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, edited by William Butler Yeats. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book, which features stories of fairies, changelings, pookas, banshees, and other famous creatures of the Irish imagination.
Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is A book that remains shut is but a block. (an English proverb). So... open those books! And read! Details at the Proverb Lab.
Wednesday Event on Campus: The Union Programming Board will be serving free Lemon Chills in the Union Food Court from 11:30AM - 12:30PM (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.
Summer Travel Map. I've updated the Summer Travel Map showing the countries people visited this summer. If you haven't added your country to the list, you can do that at the Ning: Summer Travel. This image is just a screenshot of the actual map; you can find the zoomable map here. Thanks to everybody who shared information already about the countries that they visited!
Travel Video. Last but not least, in the spirit of travel, I wanted to share this wonderful video that Shelby made of her adventures in Italy; you can find out more about that in Shelby's Introduction at the Ning. Here's a direct link to the YouTube video.
Note: You can page back through older blog posts to see any announcements you might have missed.
