If you're getting this email, you've been assigned to teach this fall in one of our four laptop-ready classrooms (LA 17S, LA 20S, RB 106, and RB 107).
Things you should know:
* We've got enough laptops for everyone. In fact, we'll have enough Tablet PCs for everyone, which I think is fantastic news. (When I say "we've got," I mean that they're ordered and should arrive soon.) A few of you, I know, would prefer to use your own laptops; please drop me a note right now if that's you. (I've got you down for "using own computer" already, Martha.)
* It's my hope that I'll be able to hand you laptops to work with in early August, so that you'll have time to play with them before school starts. We are at the mercy of Gateway, though, so I can't make that promise yet.
* I'll be doing a basic teaching-in-laptop-rooms hour during WP orientation (8/14).
* I'm posting relevant ideas and links to a blog (here: http://www.portablebsu.suprglu.com/). (This is actually a combo blog that combines posts to the old Portable Malaise blog [http://portablebsu.blogspot.com] and posts to a new Del.icio.us account I'm using for links to articles of note [http://del.icio.us/portablebsu].) I'm also working on help and resource pages which I'll begin to make available online later this month.
* By the way: http://del.icio.us is a pretty fantastic tool for teaching with computers, if you need to view websites in class. Basically, it's an online bookmarking site, so you can bookmark pages and have access to your bookmarks from any computer. It also lets you "tag" the pages you bookmark, which is like slipping them into folders, but better. You could, say, "tag" a page with "plagiarism," if you were teaching about plagiarism. Then, in class, you bring up all your pages tagged "plagiarism" (or "audience") just by searching for that tag. But you can also use multiple tags for one site, so maybe you tag that plagiarism site as "funny" or "Eng103," too, and it will come up on searches for those terms/tags. (More on del.icio.us later . . .)
* Motion sensors they installed in RB 106 and 107 are going to make the lights in there turn on automatically when we walk in (and then turn off automatically a little while after there stops being motion in the room). Cool. It's sort of like Buck Rogers, but without the silly Mel Blanc robot.
More to come . . .
Fred Johnson
PS: Email me with any questions or concerns you have at this point.
No comments:
Post a Comment