Thursday, February 13

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 also the grace period if you did not finish 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 one of the busiest weeks of the 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!

The following items are for fun and exploration:

New Tech Tip: Last week I added two new Tech Tips to the Tech Tip list, a Pinterest Basics tip, and also this one about creating a Pinterest Portfolio. I've been adding some items to the class portfolios I made, and it's definitely a very fun way to bookmark and save things online!

Writing Humor: As a follow-up to yesterday's video about emoticons, I thought you might enjoy these 19th-century emoticons. They come from the American humor magazine Puck.

Foreign Words in English: Today's foreign word in English is Singapore, which means "Lion-City," a name that comes from Sanskrit. For details, see this blog post. The image shows the famous mer-lion that is one of the symbols of the city:

Featured Storybook: Indian Horror Story: Tales of the Lingering Souls. This haunted house was owned by a mysterious man named Yash, whose eerie portrait has presided over a series of grisly deaths that echo the episodes of the ancient epics.

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 contents of the book. The Santhal people live in eastern India.

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

Ramayana Image: Today's Ramayana image shows Ravana abducting Sita. You can see her dropping her jewelry while the great bird Jatayu confronts Ravana.

Thursday Event on Campus: As part of Black History Month, there will be a screening of Spike Lee's School Daze in Meacham at 7PM (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

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