First and foremost, a big THANK YOU TO EVERYONE for all the good work that you did in the class, especially on the Storybooks. Every semester I am amazed by the creativity of the Storybooks, and that was very true this semester! Next semester's students will have so many inspiring projects to look at as they get started. I also had the pleasure of learning some new stories that I had never heard before, which is why I will never get bored teaching these classes: I get to learn new things all the time. So, thank you all for all your good work!
Ning. Please take a last look at your comment wall at the Ning and at your blog to see if you got some comments in the last days of class. There might have been some people who left comments on your Storybook as late as this Friday morning for the Week 15 Internet assignment. Also, if you want to save any of the stories you wrote at the Ning, please make sure you copy them and save them now. You could even create a new blog of your own to save the posts you want to keep and also to continue blogging! (Blogger.com is a great option, as is Tumblr.com or WordPress.com - there are so many excellent free blogging options nowadays.)
Evaluations. If you have not filled out the course evaluation yet at eval.ou.edu, I hope you will do so! The deadline is Sunday, May 4. Your feedback is incredibly helpful to me in making improvements to these courses, and it is also a big help to the College in general as they continue to develop the online course program. Plus, you might win a free iPad just for participating! If you want to leave comments directly for future students in this class, you can do that too; here's how to add your comments to that page for future students, and I would also be very grateful for any comments you want to make about some big changes coming in Fall 2014 for both of these classes.
Announcements. Some of you have signed up to receive these announcements by email. You can stay on the list if you want, or you can remove yourself from the list very easily; there is a link at the bottom of every email which is a "remove me" link. If you run into any problems with that, let me know and I will remove you manually. There will be new announcements again starting in mid-August when the Fall semester begins. If you want to see the Storybooks next semester, following along with the announcements is one way to do that!
The following items are for fun and exploration:
Mythology Words in English: Today's mythology word in English is GEOLOGY, which comes from the Greek goddess of the earth, Gaia. For details, see this blog post.
Featured Storybooks. Here are the two popular favorites this semester: Erica's Myth-Folklore Storybook, The Afterlife: A Dog's Tale, and Kathryn's Ramayana Museum of Art in Indian Epics.
FREE Kindle eBook: Myths and Legends of All Nations by Logan Marshall. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book. I thought this wide-ranging book would be a good choice for the last day of the semester!
Mahabharata Image: Today's Mahabharata image is Ganesha. As the god of auspicious beginnings, Ganesha can preside over the end of this semester and the beginning of good new things!
Learning Resource: Garden of Your Mind. I hope you will get lots of time to grow some wonderful things in the garden of your mind this summer!
Note: You can page back through older blog posts to see any announcements you might have missed.
