Friday, September 20

HAPPY FRIDAY! You have reached the end of Week 5! The Read and Respond assignment (blog commenting) is available now. Please make sure you get started on the end-of-week assignments soon; they are due today or over the weekend.

Class Procedures and Reminders:

Storybook Stack. If you turned in a Week 4 Storybook assignment on Sunday, you should have gotten comments back from me now, with points recorded in the Gradebook. If you turned something in during the grace period on Monday or later in the week, it may still be in the stack. Because the Introduction is often the hardest part of the Storybook for people to write, this is the week when it takes me the longest to read and reply to everybody's assignments. So, if I don't manage to finish everything in the stack on Friday, I will get comments back to you on Saturday at the latest for any assignment turned in by 8AM on Friday. Anything turned in after 8AM on Friday morning will go into the stack for next week.

GoogleSites Tips. For the Week 5 Storybook assignment, you will be publishing your Introduction at your Storybook website. Here are some Google Sites tips you might want to look at as you continue to work on the layout and design of your site: design templates (you can change your template at any time) - font sizes and other design elements - image size and placement - site title and page titles - site navigation. Also, please review the information on adding a new page - ESPECIALLY the part in bold red about making your new page a "top level" page; if you don't do that, you'll end up with a subpage, and that will in turn cause all kinds of problems for your navigation panel.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Featured Resource: Good Writing is Rewriting! Learning to Revise. This blog post from the Walden University Writing Center blog contains some great advice about revising, which is a very important part of the writing process in this class, as you will see with the Week 5 Storybook assignment. :-)


Featured Storybook: A Dog's Adventures. In this Storybook, a dog named Bentley leaves his home in Norman behind and travels the world.


FREE Kindle eBook: Vergil's Aeneid as translated by John Dryden. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information. For those of you in Myth-Folklore who want to read more of the Aeneid, Dryden's English verse translation is a fine way to do that; Dryden was one of the great poets of 17th-century England, and he was instrumental in making the Latin classics available to an English audience.


Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is Good books are true friends (wise words from Francis Bacon). Details at the Proverb Lab. The image I used for this poster is by the Renaissance Dutch painter Jan van Eyck.


Ramayana Image: Today's Ramayana image is another view of Jatayu, this time shown with Rama and Lakshmana.


KGOU OneSix8. Visit the OneSix8 blog for detailed information about all kinds of events this weekend in Norman and surrounding areas. The Gatesway Balloon Festival, for example, features over 30 hot air balloons, along with live entertainment, pony rides, food and all kinds of fun in Claremore all day Friday and Saturday.

Friday Event on Campus: There will be free showings of Monsters University at 6PM, 9PM and midnight in Meacham Auditorium (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

September 20: Heinrich Hoffmann. Today is the anniversary of the death of Heinrich Hoffmann in 1894 (he was born in 1809). Hoffmann was a German psychiatrist who is best known today for his book Der Struwwelpeter, a collection of stories about badly behaved children, among other topics. You can read the book online in English, and you will also be learning more about it from Josh's Storybook this semester in Myth-Folklore! For more about Der Struwwelpeter, see this Wikipedia article, which is also the source for this illustration from a 1917 edition of the book:


Note: You can page back through older blog posts to see any announcements you might have missed.