Week 8. Famous Last Words: Rotating Anansi

My rotating Anansi; more about that below:

So this week was Review Week and I really enjoyed that; it was very different this time as a student because in my teacher role, review week is basically the same as other weeks (I spend all week reading and replying to projects). So, it was very cool to have a chance to write my own reflections looking back on the first half of the semester, and I enjoyed reading reflections from everybody in class also. There are lots of quotes I will use for my Can*Innovate presentation; I really like the idea of having quotes from the current semester in there, and not just quotes from old evaluations.

It was also really good to take stock and realize that I am indeed on my way to get an A in this class after all, so I jiggled my spreadsheet to show me just how many points I should be trying to get each week to do that. I only need about 20 points per week now, which is totally doable I think (I'll be in Austin next weekend, but I might even get a little bit of time to read and write; who knows -- every trip is different, and I just go with the flow). Seeing all the useful things I can do with this Google Sheet makes me cranky about the Canvas Gradebook; I wish it worked like a real spreadsheet so that I could do all this color-coding and different kinds of sorting and filtering there, and so that students could do the same for themselves also.

I've gotten in the habit of writing my story for the coming week over the weekend; I just can't find time to focus during the week to write an actual story. That's how I came up with that rotating Anansi; I took one of the illustrations for my Anansi story and played with LunaPic and GIMP to animate it; yes, it's kind of dopey, but I sure had fun doing that. Someday it would be so cool to really learn about animation. Anyway, I am super-happy with this story: Brer Anansi Borrows Money.

I did some other extra credit stuff this week that was also really helpful (I'm going to be obsessing about Edward de Bono, that's for sure!). The other night Amazon was being cranky and wouldn't play Babylon 5 so instead of vegging out in front of the TV, I listened to an audiobook and colored until my husband was ready for bingeing (and we watched NYPD Blue on Hulu, which was behaving). Anyway, listening and coloring is always so relaxing! I need to do that more, and I think some of those de Bono books are audiobooks. So when I finish Babylon 5 (eegad, I love that show...), instead of starting a new show I might take a break and read a book like that, plus coloring. And then do a show, and then switch to a book and so. Anyway, we'll see. But I was glad Amazon was being cranky so that I reminded myself of how coloring and listening to a book is just as much fun, or more so, than watching TV.

But who can resist Babylon 5...? I found these at the Babylon 5 Memes Twitter account: