[Michelle]

Hello,
My webpage will be for the 1st semester nursing class, Foundations of Caring. I already uploaded the Community Survey document that the students will need to work on and then post. I found out yesterday that the survey cannot be filled in while on the site, it will have to be downloaded, filled in, and then uploaded again as a pdf file. So I may have the students hand that in as a hard copy, and then they can upload the summaries they have to write about the community and what they would focus on as a nurse in that area for any issues they discovered while researching. I am still deciding how to approach it. I loaded also the course outline and weekly reading assignments onto the site so they can reference it. My students have to use blackboard for all of our other documents and grades, and I have to post these documents for the other 2 sections that I do not teach, so I will not be putting all documents only on this site. I hope to be able to play a bit more with the site before August because I want to be able to show the students exactly how to post their papers so others can read about different neighborhoods and learn about different cultures and areas that they may not be familiar with.

[Shelley E Smith]

You accomplished quite a lot in the two days, Michelle! Your description of your course and the need to leave some things on Blackboard makes me think of one of the examples Jim Groom shared with us, of a professor who used really used the site for only one thing, to showcase a specific assignment. It that case it was the poetry review project where students wrote a review of one previously un-reviewed living poet. (And some of them responded!) In your case, you are also using the site for the things most appropriate to the medium, the community project and the RSS feeds. And this makes me wonder–are there ways to leverage the possibility that community members might contribute? (You might have private and public sections of the survey and/or tweak it with the audience in mind.)

Cool!

[Jody R. Rosen]

These sound like great uses for the site, Michelle! I wonder if you can create a page that will link your students to the Blackboard login, and something on Blackboard that will link your students to the course site, so that the two become integrated in a defined way. That might make the different uses clear to students, while also reminding them of where to go to do those things.

jrr