Heading Into Week Three

Today for the F2F (that's how I'm writing face-to-face now - cool, right?!) session, we had a seminar about gender roles in Ibo culture. Many people had interesting thoughts on this. During the discussions, I kept track of who was participating. I was pleased to note that we were able to get 100% participation in each class, and I want to continue to find ways to do this. Tyler suggested in his weekly reflection that I continue to use the "Wednesday Friends" technique, and maybe incorporate something similar on optional days. I do feel a responsibility to build community, and things like Wednesday Friends kind of help, I think.

During one of the seminars (4th hour, I think), people had questions about the clothing of the Ibo people. I found this great link, but we didn't have time to discuss it.

Many people noted in their weekly reflections that they enjoyed recording their podcasts on Audacity. Today, Mr. Walker and I got together to publish the final products. He and I had a misunderstanding about the format of the segments - I thought we were putting them together in one file, and he thought I wanted to publish them individually as episodes. In the end, I think having them individually is kind of nice, and I think the third graders might enjoy clicking on them one-by-one. There are a few groups that need to publish, still - another benefit of this format is that I can just add them to the feed and they'll appear.

Click here for Fresh Press segments. Click here for iMPRESS. And click here for Hot Paper.

I'm excited about tomorrow's optional session on folktales. I disagreed with Erik's thought (which he posted on Moodle) that Achebe's novel lacks deep meaning. I think the character of Okonkwo is very well developed and extremely complex. I also really like the dispassionate tone and how the impacts of colonialism are left to the reader to "judge." I'm interested to hear people's final opinions on Thursday and Friday.

Another idea I'm thinking through is the concept of "busy work." I always try to avoid what I think of as "busy work" in my classes, blended or not. To me, busy work is work that doesn't require any thought or that is redundant. Brainstorming topics and themes, writing PIEs about complex questions, and responding thoughtfully to others' comments would not qualify as busy work in my mind. Michael, Max, and Alma (and I think one other person in 5th hour?) suggested that they're doing too much busy work. What does busy work mean to you guys? What could you do instead of the things I've assigned to show your deep thinking and understanding about course content? I'm really curious to get more feedback on this.

I also heard from Justin and Erik that they wanted the forums un-grouped so they could interact with other classes. Noted! And fixed for this week!