Class Procedures and Reminders:
Storybook comments. Please make sure you look for my comments in the emails I send back to you; in addition to comments at the top of the email, there are comments marked with ==> in the body of the email. Please read through all the comments in the email and if you have any questions, write and ask me! You should save these emails, too, since you will be working on the Storybook all semester and you might need to look back at a past email to get some information to help you with a later assignment.
Storybook Stack. I'm still working my way through the large stack of Storybook assignments that people have turned in. If you turned in an assignment before Sunday at 3PM, you should have comments back from me now. If you turned something in later on Sunday or on Monday or Tuesday, it is probably still in the stack, waiting for me to get to it. If you want to check to make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here.
You really can call me Laura! (repeat announcement) You don't need to call me Professor or Dr. or anything like that, really! (Plus, I am just an instructor and not a professor, so I don't want to get in trouble with the professor police, ha ha.) Anyway, since I'm on a first-name basis with all of you, please do the same and just call me Laura.
The following items are for fun and exploration:
Featured Tech Tip: Make a LOLCat. The recommended Tech Tip today is how to make a LOLCat using the Cheezburger.com website, which you can also use for making all kinds of memes!
Featured Storybook: Hero Academy. In this Storybook, young heroes study the dragon legends of different cultures, seeking to understand just what it means to be a hero.
FREE Kindle eBook: A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine by Percy J. Billinghurst. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the specific fables contained in the book. La Fontaine's adaptations of Aesop's fables are the most influential literary version of the fables ever written.
Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is Books: the children of the brain (a quote from Jonathan Swift). Details at the Proverb Lab. Jonathan Swift is best known today as the author of Gulliver's Travels.
Ramayana Image: Today's Ramayana image is Rama and Lakshmana Battling Maricha and Subahu. Rama and Lakshmana are brothers, the sons of King Dasaratha, while Maricha and Subahu are also brothers, demon brothers, the sons of Tataka. Subahu died in this fight, but Maricha survived and went on to make more trouble for Rama and Lakshmana later during their forest exile.
September 11: Oh! Susanna. On this day in 1847, one of the most well-known songs in American music, Oh! Susanna, was first performed in public. You can read more about the song and its history in this Wikipedia article. Below, you can see some of the sheet music as published in 1848. Take a moment and see how much of the song you can sing by heart! Then you can take a look at the usual lyrics here - although the original lyrics, written in the minstrel tradition, are definitely not something people sing today; you can see the original lyrics here. For more about the minstrel tradition, see this Wikipedia article.
Note: You can page back through older blog posts to see any announcements you might have missed.
