Thursday, September 19

Today is Thursday of WEEK 5. If you have not turned in your Week 4 Storybook assignment yet, you have until noon today to turn that in for partial credit. Thursday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due on Wednesday.

Class Procedures and Reminders:

Missed Assignments and Extra Credit. Especially if you have midterms going on in your other classes right now, you might miss some assignments in this class. That is not a problem; you can make up missing assignments later on with extra credit when you have more time - that is what the extra credit is for. To see how you are doing week by week, there is a Grading Chart here that I hope will be helpful. If you have questions about that, let me know.

Storybook Stack. I'm still working my way through the very large stack of Storybook assignments that people have turned in. If you turned in an assignment before 11PM on Sunday, you should have comments back from me now. If you turned something in later on Sunday or on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, it is probably still in the stack, waiting for me to get to it - you can check to make sure I have your assignment by looking at the contents of the stack here. I will do my best to respond to everything in the stack before the weekend, but this week is the busiest of the whole semester for me, so I might end up doing schoolwork on Saturday morning (something I try very hard to avoid...). We'll see how it works out this semester! If you turned something in on time, I promise to get it back before the weekend; I might not get to the late assignments until Saturday morning.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Featured Tech Tip: Google Sites Navigation Options. As you experiment with the Google Site for your Storybook, you can use this Tech Tip to see which navigation option is best for your page design. Here's a Storybook with horizontal navigation, which is a very good choice if your stories will have short titles:

Featured Storybook: The Real Arabian Nights. The stories in this Storybook are told by the magician you know from the adventures of Aladdin - and, as you can imagine, he is not happy about how the usual version of that story is told!

FREE Kindle eBook: Folklore of the Santal Parganas by Cecil Henry Bompas. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the 185 stories (!) contained in this book.The Santal people are one of the largest tribal groups in India, living in the eastern states and also in Bangladesh. You can read more about the Santals at Wikipedia.

Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is When the house is built, the carpenter is forgotten (proverb from India). Details at the Proverb Lab. I was glad to find a photo at Flickr of carpenters in India to use for this proverb!

Ramayana Image: Today's Ramayana image is Ravana abducting Sita. You can see that the great bird, Jatayu, is trying to defend her, while Sita drops her jewelry to the ground, thus leaving a sign for Rama.

Thursday Event on Campus: As part of "Italy Week," there will be a free screening of Life is Beautiful at 7:30PM in the Union Courtyard; this film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1998 (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

September 19: Sukkot. Today marks the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. This festival is usually known as "Feast of the Booths" or "Feast of the Tabernacles" in English. During the festival, people build special huts in which to celebrate the holiday. You can read more about the Festival of Sukkot at the BBC website and at Wikipedia, which is also the source for the image of a festival booth below:



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