Week 10: Famous Last Words

I am pleased to report that I actually SURVIVED last week! I started out the week in Austin, and in addition to the usual drama there was a water crisis brought on by flooding; the boil-water order is still in place because it is not safe to drink water from the tape; how intense is that? From @AustinWater (they made really good use of Twitter for communication):

We’re gathering testing results and working with TCEQ closely. We’ll notify the public once we’re able to lift the boil water notice for all Austin Water customers. While we remain optimistic it will be later today, we need to complete the process before making any announcement.

— Austin Water (@AustinWater) October 28, 2018

Then, on Friday I had my Can*Innovate presentation. I was incredibly nervous about that (presenting things is just not my style), but it went well and people contacted me afterwards with questions about bringing more creativity into their class assignments, so that made me feel really good. Both of the Google Forms I built into my Can*Innovate website had comments in them from people, so I was able to write them back on Saturday.

The keynote presentation for the conference was by a student, Natalie Miller, and she was FABULOUS. It was one of the best conference presentations I have ever seen, online or in-person. When the video goes up next week, I will come back to this post and embed the video here! This is her presentation page at the conference course site. This is her opening slide:

I loved everything about this conference, and I agree with Michelle, one of the organizers, that the most important thing was that it was free and open to all, as opposed to most educational conferences that end up costing hundreds of dollars to attend, or a couple thousand dollars when you add in the plane fare, hotel, etc. etc. etc. This conference was just as good as any in-person conference, and it didn't cost anyone anything to attend!

There were many, many Tweets shared during #CanInnovate18 but this one is my favorite. ☺︎ https://t.co/p5EqMoNuqE

— Michelle Pacansky-Brock (@brocansky) October 28, 2018

Then, on Saturday, I caught up on my homework for this class, and I had two really big revelations. First, for the reading I should be annotating the units without notes! DOH! I cannot believe I did not think about that from the start of the semester. There are actually a lot of units in the UnTextbook that do not have notes on the story, so if I focus my reading choices on those units, I can do the reading, take notes, and add those notes to the UnTextbook so that those units will be more valuable. When I take this class again next Fall (my current plan), I will do that from the start! I've still got a few weeks left here to do that: better late than never!

My other revelation came when reading the Native American Hero stories (I took notes on the first half of that unit for extra Week 10 reading this weekend): I need to do a big (BIG) anthology of aetiological tales. My chain tale project is totally fun and I love doing it, but chain tales are a very marginal and weird folktale phenomenon. If I want to do an anthology that is really all-embracing and useful for the widest possible audience, aetiological tales are the best choice. Everybody loves aetiological tales, right? Plus, they provide a natural bridge to collaborating with natural science teachers and social science teachers. So, instead of doing just chain tales, I am going to do aetiological tales too, and my story for this week is about why the bat's wings don't have feathers. It's a retelling of a very cool Apache hero legend, and I am so happy about how it came out: Why The Bat's Wings Have No Feathers.

Plus, the bat makes it feel like Halloween, right?

And that is the big event coming up this week: whoo-hoo! Or, maybe I should say: BOO! :-)

On that subject, I thought this Lunarbaboon cartoon was so cute: