Class Procedures and Reminders:
Storybook schedule. For those of you who are on the regular Storybook schedule, your Week 9 assignment is a story revision. For those of you on an alternate schedule, you can see exactly what you have due for Week 9 by checking in the Desire2Learn "Progress" item in the Gradebook. If you have any questions about that, let me know! I'm back online and will be checking emails this weekend periodically as people get ready to go back to school.
Storybook stack. I've updated the stack to include the Storybook assignments people have turned in over the break; you can see the contents of the stack here. I'll be updating that periodically over the weekend, and then on Monday morning I'll start reading and replying to the assignments in the order they were turned in, starting with the assignments from last Saturday, March 15.
Working ahead on your Storybook. (repeat announcement) If you want to work ahead on your Storybook, please do so! You can actually write your remaining stories now, and that way you will have them all lined up and ready to go. You can only turn in one Storybook story at a time (otherwise, keeping track of the revisions gets really complicated), but if you want to get your stories written and ready to go, that's a great strategy for working ahead and dramatically reducing your work load in the final weeks of the semester.
The following items are for fun and exploration:
Research Resource: Open Educational Resources. Stacy Zemke of the OU Libraries has been developing some great Open Educational Resource (OER) guides, including a very useful guide for Finding Open Images.
Words to Watch: Today's words to watch out for are ANGEL and ANGLE. For details, see this blog post. Although these words do not sound the same, it's a very common typo, one that the spellchecker cannot help you with.
Featured Storybook: Robin of Sherwood: Sherwood's Side of the Story. Not only is the Major Oak of Sherwood Forest your surprising storyteller for this Storybook from last year, you will also be amazed at the role the trees themselves played in the traditional Robin Hood legends, a secret which the Major Oak himself reveals to you in his versions of the stories.
FREE Kindle eBook: Curious Myths of the Middle Ages by Sabine Baring-Gould. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book; two of my favorite chapters are about "The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus" and "The Dog Gellert."
Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is The one who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; the one who does not ask a question is a fool forever (a Chinese proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. As you can guess, I am a big believer in asking questions, and that is one reason why I love the Internet: so many answers to so many questions, instantly. You just have to ask!
Mahabharata Image: Today's Mahabharata image is The Disrobing of Draupadi, an event with enormous karmic consequences for all the people involved.
March 22: World Water Day. The United Nations recognizes March 22 as the World Day for Water. Each year has a special theme, and you can read about the themes from past years in this Wikipedia article. The theme for 2014 is Water and Energy. You can read more at the official World Water Day website.
Note: You can page back through older blog posts to see any announcements you might have missed.
