So I said that I’m trying to renounce paper.

Here’s something new. I made a dropbox in WebCT/7460 where you can both download and upload your demographic survey form.

I asked for permission to submit them electronically to the College - and I hope they will take them that way. If so, all paper will be eliminated from this task, along with the manipulation required for sorting, carrying, and storing hard copies.

The due date for this semester is October 4.

Who does this apply to?  Any active intern - meaning, if you are completing any intern hours at all this semester, then you must submit one for your primary site. For most of you, you’ll do one this semester and next semester for the same school.

You do not have to submit them for the other-site visits where you’re just spending a day each to observe.

What if you have two primary sites? (You know who you are!) Yes, you have to complete one for each site.

Confused? If we’ve had any interaction about your internship at all, look in the WebCT/7460 Gradebook under ‘demographic forms required.’  It will list there what you owe. If it’s blank, that means we haven’t gotten that far yet.

I will further clarify as necessary on Sep 13 (our Year 2 internship orientation).

I’ve been playing with Google Forms - seems to be too easy to be real! Let’s try something.

The easiest way, I believe, to share class notes is to have a GoogleDoc shared among the people in the class. Instead of one poor person typing everyone’s email address into the “Invite” place, maybe we can automate this.

Go to this address to sign up for the 6900 Class Notes. This doesn’t obligate you yet to taking notes at a certain time, but it will (hopefully!) get you into the document, once I’ve had a chance to cut and paste the names in.

Hello!  I’m back to work now and almost ready for Saturday.

With this post, the focus of this blog changes.  It will have 3 purposes for Fall 2008:

• EDIT 6900 class blog, primarily
• Internship news - pay attention if you plan to begin or conduct your Internship during the 2008-09 school year (most of Cohort 7 will do this)
• Other general Cohort 7 news

So, I apologize in advance to Ed.S. students - there will be much traffic here that pertains only to EDIT 6900. You have your own blog.  Unfortunately, you will need to watch this one, too.

I will see you all on Saturday, Aug. 16, 9a, UGA/Gwinnett (Sever Rd.). We will meet for 2 hours. Dr. Clinton will work with EDIT 6400 11-1 (including lunch), and then EDIT 7340 fills out the remainder of the day.

WebCT is ready - check for your name there.  Course materials are ready from the 6900 Home Page, and WebCT links there as well.  Explore to find:

• the syllabus
• my contact info (on the WebCT 6900 home page)
• exact dates and times for all meetings
• assignment descriptions
• jobs to sign up for
• first day’s agenda
• and lots more.

Bring your nametag.

I look forward to seeing you Saturday.

I am pretty much finished with grading. Check the WebCT Gradebook. The official grade rolls aren’t available yet through the UGA system, but I won’t forget to complete the minute they’re available.

Course evals: 27 students have completed (thank you all!) That’s very good, but 100% would be better! Four to go. (Can’t see your grade? This might be why.)

One final goody for Cataloging: Vivian created a guide for downloading MARC records from the Library of Congress. Anxious to practice this during your break?

LOL!

Hush, you might need this sooner than you think.  Thanks to Vivian for doing this. Find it in WebCT 6380/Resources. You will have access to the course for another few months.

(This post duplicates a message sent over SLM-L this morning.)

From hence forward, criminal background checks will be required for all interns. (This has been coming for awhile; all student teachers have long been doing this.)

Before you panic, let me assure you that the process seems organized and will require only a little bit of your time and money, and no trips to the police department.

Also, rest assured that no faculty member will even see the results of this report. We will become involved only if a placement is declined for some reason.

The time to start this process is when you submit your First Approval - basically, when the entire internship process starts for you. You will be sent to a web site where you can fill out the application and pay by credit card for the $50 fee. (Gwinnett interns for 08-09 have already begun all of this.)

In the meantime, you can read instructions by visiting the Internship home page: http://it.coe.uga.edu/~mfitzger/7460. The College’s instructions are linked there.

If you are employed by the school system where you will intern, you may be able to waive the process - this depends on the county/system.

No action is required of anyone at this moment! This is just a good time to give you an alert so that it won’t be such a surprise as many Cohort 7 students move into their internship year.

If you have specific questions about the CBC, the College person in charge is Martha Pruet: mkristin@uga.edu.

It’s 7:45 a.m., and I’ve graded everything in sight.  Here’s the scoop:

• If you have satisfied every single requirement, you can now see your grade in WebCT.
• I spent some time straightening up the gradebook, etc., so it may look different to you. Rearranged the order of columns, added some to match course requirements not already there, and deleted some from last year.
• Course evals: 17 people have completed (thank you!). I pushed the date back to give the rest of you a chance in case you forgot.  Remember, I can’t see what you said, only that you did it.
• Permissions: E-permission, Research Permission: I checked these off in the gradebook as “y” for done, blank or “no” for not yet done.  Again, I’m not worried about whether you filled out the form with a yes or no, I’m just checking off completion here. (I didn’t even take time to look at what you said on these to preclude any possible bias.)
• Two points for checking other students’ KR assignments:  these were harder to track than expected. I did my best.  If you are missing your 2 points, shoot me an email about who you checked.  I can easily verify, but it’s really hard for me to download all of those assignments to check this again.  (This is only 2 points. You may do the math and figure, eh.  But I do appreciate the many of you who did this - and some who did WAY MORE than their share.)

I’m on duty if you have questions about anything today and tomorrow.

Thank you all for responding to my  “less than 50% submitted” remark Saturday before last.  I haven’t been able to catch up since!  But this is a very good thing.

I am devoting the next 3 days to wrapping up summer courses. If I have to grade around the clock, so be it!

My goal is to finish and then take a 2-week home improvement (and tornado recovery) “vacation.”

Overall, there are very few things outstanding - just a handful per assignment. Let me know if you run into any glitches.

I’m sure you don’t need reminding that everything is due today.  And then your course eval by tomorrow. Thanks!

This is a straight copy/paste from Dr. Clinton, in response to a query from Brittany about EDIT 6400 texts:

I have good news for you. We will use a couple of texts, but both of them
are free online.

(I may also distribute additional short readings here and there during the
course.)

The first text is Dr. Michael Orey’s e-Book that has been developed over
time for, and with, this course. It was recently converted into a Wiki
format. The e-Book is online at:

http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/

The second book is edited by Bransford, Brown, and Cocking (1999) and is
called How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School published by
National Academy Press in Washington.

Free online reading of this book, and printable chapters, are available from
the publisher at their web address:

http://www.nap.edu/html/howpeople1/

(Note that there are 1999 and 2000 versions of this book. Only the 1999
edition is available in full html chapters. So the 1999 edition is a more
printer-friendly online version, and that is what we will use.)

I hope this helps - and I look forward to meeting you in August!

Greg

A foretaste of what Buffy has been up to:

Here’s link if the embedding magic doesn’t work for you.

The agenda is set, near enough.  I’m expecting to learn a new trick or two!

Several important announcements for today:

1. The agenda for Saturday, although not yet complete, is coming together. Remember to read your one article posted on this list. Also, we will need notetakers. Buffy Hamilton is coming as our special guest - the Georgia Queen of SLM 2.0 - and she will shower us with cool new ideas. Eat a good breakfast; she is definitely high-energy!
2. I caught up with all grading at about 10am on Monday. If you submitted something prior to that time and haven’t seen a grade for it, then I didn’t get it! (Yes, several things have come in since then.)
3. Yesterday, in one fell swoop, I finished writing up my notes on KR. Access these from WebCT/6380/Resources/MAF’s notes on KR.doc. There’s no need to hurry over there and look; no impact on the KR exercises. These are my highlights and disagreements with the text. It may serve as a review somewhere along the line, or clarify a discrepancy.
4. There was some sort of a glitch with one of the Mortimer quiz questions. That’s cleared up; not sure how that may have affected scores of quizzes already completed.
5. Courtesy of Andrew, here is a little bio of Dewey, which might provide human interest background when you start teaching the system to little kids (they enjoy hearing about people’s weirdnesses).

I look forward to seeing you Saturday, if I don’t blog something to you before then.