Week 4: Hurricane Went South

So, this week was very topsy-turvy: originally I was supposed to be going to Austin this weekend, but then came the hurricane predictions that had the hurricane coming ashore at Topsail and then heading for the Triangle, right over RDU airport. Some airlines canceled all their flights, some didn't; my husband (meteorologist) warned me that I would probably not be able to make my trip. So, as it turns out, I was not able to make my trip, but the hurricane ended up going south, so nothing much really happened up here where we live, except for power outages and some tornado warnings (that was yesterday).

The unexpected result is that I am home this weekend, which I didn't expect, so I did some classwork today (Saturday), and I'm really happy for how this week went. I ended up reading Cupid and Psyche because I thought I was going to do a chain-tale based on Psyche's tasks (chain-of-requests is common type of chain tale!), but then I realized I could do a chain of mourners when Psyche dies, or seems to die, and I was really happy with how that turned out: Psyche Lives! When I did that story, it made me think how cool it would be to take the whole episode of Cupid and Psyche and fill it up with all kinds of folktale and fairy tale motifs. Apuleius told the story in a very literary style (of course, he was writing a novel!), but is fundamentally a kind of folktale or fairy tale, and it would be fun to retell the whole thing with folkloric devices instead of all the literary devices that Apuleius used.

With all the craziness last week, I also almost did not get my story finished, and was working on it Friday morning during the grace period. Clearly, I need to do my real work for this class over the weekend, so I'm going to do next week's reading and story tomorrow. I already know what I want to do for that: the Panchatantra is one of the reading options, and the stronger-and-strongest story of the mouse-woman is in there. I will definitely be making changes (she will go on the quest on her own!), and I have an idea about a fun choose-your-ending where I would get that version with the cat from Odo of Cheriton's medieval version.

Since I really needed to hunker down and concentrate when I was writing that story, so I bought a Chrome app called CalmlyWriter.

Usually I just write in a plain text editor, but CalmlyWriter makes this nice typewriter sound while you type and it has a word counter that displays (if you want) all the time. I don't think I'll be using it for my writing all the time, but I like the idea of having an app I use when I'm writing a story, even if it's just a kind of ritual thing: now I am writing a STORY. Don't bother me. :-)

I also put in place the Google Slides option I was going to use for the Project Gallery since PhotoSnack went out of business... and it worked great! I wasn't really very happy with the PhotoSnack solution anyway; this Google Slides thing is so much easier, and I was amazed that it worked great even just in a 200-pixel wide version in the sidebar of the blog. So now the projects are in the sidebar of the class announcements blog! Yay! The images are a little degraded at that small size, but it definitely works, and the images look really good in the version I've embedded at the wiki: Indian Epics and Myth-Folklore. I wrote up a Tech Tip for that, and I also redid the Padlet Tech Tip to make it about pets. Honestly, I just wish OU would let me teach a class about cool web tools... but that's not going to happen. So I will just continue to play around with Tech Tips extra credit as my stealthy class-I-wish-I-were-teaching ha ha, and let students make this into a class-they-wish-they-were-taking, instead of Gen. Ed. Humanities.

Next week will be the first full week of projects coming in, with Portfolio stories that get detailed feedback. That means I will have to really focus, but it will be so exciting to start doing that part of the work of the class and feeling truly useful. Since I can't write up feedback to myself about my own Portfolio stories (although I do find myself revising and revising, ha ha, which is good!), I was thinking that during the revision weeks for that project, I might try documenting my own feedback process. I've never done that before, and I know it's different from the rubric-driven process that so many teachers use, so maybe that will be a good experiment. I need to figure out something, since I turned in my first Portfolio story for Week 4... which means I would be doing revisions in Week 5. Hmmmm.......

Meanwhile, here's a graphic I made inspired by a student's blog post: G.R.O.W. Go Rip Open Windows.