beginnings are messy

First day of class was fun. I wanted to have more time to talk about writing, but I think it is really important to spend the time in “getting to know ya” activities early on. I realized there are some glitches in the materials I have on Blackboard. This has never happened before, but something about the way my new Mac translated some fonts caused the documents posted in Bb to show wingdings in Jepson g-20. I KNEW I should have gone over and looked at things on the PC’s there! It seems so often that I know how I should do things right, but lack the time to do it. No matter–the students highlighted and changed fonts where necessary. It didn’t seem to freak them. I wonder if their computers in their dorms are reading the mystery font well… I probably should just change the offending lines. I think to do that I’ll have to take my laptop over to Jepson and look at the docs on both machines at once and figure out which font is a problem.
I wrote the first blog post on plastic plates today, and will do the next one as a demo at the end of class on Thursday. I need to prepare a handout for them about getting to Blogger and into Plastic Plates. In a few minutes I’ll add them all as group members so they can write posts and not just comments. Starting next week, we’ll have a schedule of post-ers and the students will take over the posting. I would like to take them through creating their own blogs (for research ) on Thursday of next week. By then I think they’ll feel familiar enough with it to get started.
As usual, there are problems with getting books. Other students seem to have grabbed my section’s books that are packaged with MyCompLab. As they figure out they have the wrong one, they’ll return them, but meanwhile my students have to keep checking in at the bookstore, which is a pain. Is there a better way? I hate using the MyComplab Package for this reason, but Exchange is the best software I have seen for doing peer comments. It is the only one with the right pedagogy of leaving ownership of the text with the author. And I love the grammar quizzes and exercises that are interactive and they can do on their own. So I am sticking with MyCompLab for this semester, but always looking for something that is less a pain for students. I’ll ask the students at the end of this semester what they think…