Teaching, Learning, Blogging

Oops. I keep forgetting to link to the English 101 blog that I will be using for the fall semester. There is now a link under "Project Information" in the upper right hand corner.

Late yesterday afternoon and last night, I changed the background color of the class blog, organized the links a little, and created another scroll bar for links to both classes.

I just spent some time this afternoon adding the link to the Paradigm Online Writing Assistant and finnagling with the direct links to specific sections of Blackboard (Discussion Board, Virtual Classroom, and Tools). All of this took some time. Frankly, though, I'm pretty sure the work I've been doing over the summer has been time-consuming only because I'm doing this for the first time and discovering what it is I want to do/can do. After doing this once, future "expeditions" shouldn't be as difficult. In fact, I should be able to show other folks how to do this, and make their experience far less frustrating--not that my experience has been particularly frustrating.

While I'm on the subject of "frustration," though, I wish Blogger would please allow folks to upgrade to Blogger Pro. I have been waiting to do so for a couple of weeks now. I want to try the RSS feed. If I handle the RSS feed properly, I might manage to create a "daily reader" for students. We'll see.

Well, Jennifer and I took the dog camping this weekend for the first time, and, thanks to the doggie tent (please don't ask . . . it's embarrassing), Sirius behaved pretty well. We will take her on our longer camping road trip in a couple weeks.

Enough of that, yesterday I met with the Pacesetters and Faculty Facilitators for this week's, and August's, new student orientation. I gave them a slightly revised version of the flyer introducing the laptop class. My primary concern is getting the word out to students about what they can expect from the course and understand the ownership and use issues associated with the laptops. I also hope to get AEGL 101-26 filled by the end of this week so I can contact each of the students.

Someone in the faculty facilitator group wondered aloud about informing students. He said something to the effect of "Aren't these students supposed to be normal students?" I am assuming that he was vaguely implying that I am "stacking the deck" in favor of students who will have the experience and desire to participate in such a project, thus making the project appear more successful than it really would be if students simply wandered into the classroom on the first day of class and were tossed a laptop computer. In retrospect, perhaps I should have explained that, as far as I know, if USCA adopts such a prrogram, we will put in a systematic process of explaining the laptop program, provide technical support, etc. I didn't do so because we were getting ready for orientation rather than discussing the project. I will have to remember to explain this during the presentation in the spring, though.