Week 4 Last Words: Portfolio Up and Running

I got my Portfolio set up today, and I am really happy with how that is working:

Big Epics, Tiny Stories

A New Take on the Ramayana and Mahabharata

With these tiny stories, the layout options are really easy, and I like how I am able to put the images to the left and right, alternating, like here on my first page of Ramayana stories:

And I am so relieved to be ahead in the class now so that I don't actually have to do any work until I get back from my next Austin trip, i.e. Week 5. I'm guessing that I might be doing schoolwork next weekend in order to get ready for the trip (catching up, getting ahead, whatever), and then I'll be gone the next weekend. So, this might very well be my last chance for several weeks to do work for the class... and that's okay! Yay! My next due date is not until February 13, as the magic spreadsheet shows me.

And I already know what I want to do for that storytelling: the backstories about Hanuman from the Uttara Kanda, just like the way I did the Ravana backstories this time. I am really glad I picked the Uttara Kanda to work with; I knew it was going to be good... and it is even easier to work with than I expected.

Best news is that the actual first week of classes went really well too. I was seriously worried when I saw that fewer students than usual had started early (my goal is always to get half of the students started in Week 0), but even though more people started only on the regular start date, it worked out okay, and I even managed to reply to all the favorite-places posts on Friday, so I am good to go for working on Introductions next week (and then the week after that, the project assignments will be ready for me to read, which is always fun, one of my favorite weeks, seeing all the topics people are interested in).

Instructure stuff is still going on also; the article in EdSurge interviewing Cristina got a lot of attention at Twitter, and I'm hoping maybe something will happen as a result. I am guessing it will be something very narrowly focused on the idea of "privacy" (rather than the ethics of AI/ML and using our data to create predictive products)... but even that is some kind of progress. 

And I'll keep banging away at the red labels in the Gradebook; someone added the class on Friday so I had to rerun James's scripts to reset the missing-labels variable, and of course I'll have to get into my weekly routine of running the scripts in all three classes every week to handle the late-labels. All that red ink: it is seriously scary to think that it is somehow a good idea to put punitive red labels in all those Gradebooks: MILLIONS of Gradebooks. Eeeeeeeegad.

I like my pastel spreadsheet much better. :-)