Wednesday, August 24

Today is Wednesday of WEEK 1. If you have not written your story for this week yet, that means today is Storytelling Day. I hope you will have fun with your first story for the semester! You'll also be writing your Introduction post today too. Here is a link to the Orientation assignments.

Class Procedures and Reminders

Canvas grace period. For those of you who didn't finish the Tuesday work, there a Canvas "grace period" on Wednesday morning until noon. Canvas marks the assignment late when you turn it in after the due date, but there's no penalty in terms of points. It's basically a "no-questions-asked" extension the next morning until noon. Plan on doing the work on the due date, but you do have that grace period the next morning when life's surprises get in the way of your schedule.

Blogs. The blogs are looking great... and there are so many of them now. Thank you for all your good work on that! I'll keep commenting on the Favorite Places posts today, and then as many of the Introductions as I can. I may or may not get to all the Introductions this week; I'll do my best! Then, tomorrow afternoon (Thursday) I'll put you all into blog groups so you can do the blog commenting assignment. More on that in tomorrow's announcements.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Vampire Writer. As you embark on your storytelling career in this class, I thought this would be a fun graphic to share. Find out more at the Writing Lab blog.

Coffee. And speaking of coffee... beware the Caffeine Causality Loop.

Words from India. Did you know the word "bangle" comes to English from India? Find out more at Indian Words in English.

Featured Storybook. This project is from the Indian Epics class: Sweet Dreams Are Made of These: Karmic Bedtime Stories. Four brothers and sisters each get their own special Ramayana bedtime story with a lesson to learn and an adventure to enjoy before they fall asleep that night.

Free Book Online: Legends of Florence by Charles Godfrey Leland. Since some of you have done study abroad in Italy, I thought this would be a fun book to share: legends all about the city of Florence! See the Freebookapalooza blog for links and the table of contents.

Words of Wisdom: Today's saying is A running horse has no need of spurs (a Latin proverb). Find out more at the Proverb Lab. I thought this would be a good one for getting the semester off to a good start. Here is the Latin for those of you who have studied Latin: Equo currenti non opus calcaribus.

VIDEO Today's Video: Maati Baani in New York. My favorite Indian musical group is Maati Baani, and they made this video on their first visit to the United States. Enjoy!

Growth Mindset: Today's growth mindset cat knows that growing gives you new perspective: The higher you climb, the more you can see. You can find out more at the Growth Mindset blog.

Event on Campus: There are so many reasons to go to the wonderful OU Library... and here's another one: Pokémon lures are dropping every hour on the hour 8AM - 5PM until September 2 (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

August 24: Vesuvius. On this day in the year 79 C.E., Mount Vesuvius erupted, burying the Italian cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in lava and ashes. You can read the dramatic details in this Wikipedia article, which is also the source for the image below which shows a computer-generated image of Vesuvius erupting. It was very eerie that there was an earthquake in Italy just yesterday, on the eve of this ancient volcano day:

Check out the Twitter stream for information and fun stuff during the day.