Author Archives: Julie Dodd

Harry Potter and the Socerer’s Stone — 10th anniversary edition released today

Harry Potter and the Socerer’s Stone — 10th Anniversary edition Today was the release by Scholastic of a new paperback edition of J.K. Rowling’s first in the Harry Potter series. When I read that in the business section, I was surprised to see that this is the 10th anniversary of the publication of Harry Potter […]

I’m interested in your comments

I’m interested in your comments When I started this Tumblr blog in January 2007, I had several motivations: Blogging was going to be an assignment in a course I teach, and I had never blogged before. My technology advisor and colleague Judy Robinson told me that I could blog from my iPhone with Tumblr. That […]

All calm for Quiz 1

Testing can cause anxiety for students and for the teacher. I’ve found a higher anxiety level when testing in an auditorium course like MMC 2100. Do I have enough copies of the test and of the Scantrons? Are all the questions clear? One poorly worded question could lead to more than 100 hands in the […]

Useful blogs & websites for college teachers

The assignment — find a useful blog Week Two of the grad class team blog. I asked each of them to share a blog that would be useful to college teachers — either a blog about teaching or a media-related blog. One student recommended naa.org — the Web site for the Newspaper Association of America. […]

Mixed views on blogs, limited experience in blogging

I had anticipated that most of the graduate students in Mass Communication Teacher would have done blogging at some point and that most would be reading blogs. But that wasn’t the case. Several were very enthusiastic about blogging. Those were the ones who either had an active blog or have recently had a blog. Most […]

Gator Cyberslate: New addition to my Mass Communication Teaching class

Gator Cyberslate is a new addition to my Mass Communication Teaching class this semester. I set up this blog in Blogger as a team blog. Everyone in the course can post a blog and can post comments. This is my first attempt at a group blog. I have heard mixed results of faculty who have […]

Watching Hurricane Gustav move through the Gulf toward New Orleans, I’ve been thinking about Ariane Wiltse, a former teaching assistant with me who moved back to New Orleans after completing her master’s to help tell the positive stories of New Orleans’ rebuilding. She sent an e-mail to her friends and family today to let us know that she is safely in Mobile, Ala., and will be using her friend’s blog to report on her evacuation experience  http://kathyprice.typepad.com/dispatch_from_new_orleans/ In her e-mail, she said that the drive from New Orleans to Mobile normally is three hours. It took four hours to get out of New Orleans and another five to get to Mobile. Certainly the roads didn’t look like this front page photo during the peak of the evacuation.

Watching Hurricane Gustav move through the Gulf toward New Orleans, I’ve been thinking about Ariane Wiltse, a former teaching assistant with me who moved back to New Orleans after completing her master’s to help tell the positive stories of New Orleans’ rebuilding. She sent an e-mail to her friends and family today to let us […]

“There’s no competing with sex, Santa Claus and the yearbook.” That was the advice I received from Ruth Cates Baird, my department chair and mentor, when I was teaching high school English and journalism at Oak Ridge High School.  Her message was that there are some times of year or topics of concern to students that trump any educational iniatives that we teachers devise.  As yearbook adviser, I was pleased that the yearbook made the top three most-important issues to high school students. I remember those days when the yearbook was distributed and students and teachers spent class time reading and signing yearbooks. At UF, we need to remember that weather and football are some of those major distractors.

“There’s no competing with sex, Santa Claus and the yearbook.” That was the advice I received from Ruth Cates Baird, my department chair and mentor, when I was teaching high school English and journalism at Oak Ridge High School.  Her message was that there are some times of year or topics of concern to students […]

Gator spirit for students who are season ticket holders I walked through the football stadium to get to the college so I could walk past the ticket windows. The students were lined up to pick up their tickets to the UF-Hawaii football game. Student season ticket holders also received a special UF football T-shirt — with the Pepsi logo on the back of the shirt, as we are a Pepsi campus. Go Gators!

Gator spirit for students who are season ticket holders I walked through the football stadium to get to the college so I could walk past the ticket windows. The students were lined up to pick up their tickets to the UF-Hawaii football game. Student season ticket holders also received a special UF football T-shirt — […]

 Technology in the media; technology in teaching

Yesterday was my first meeting with my two lectures for Writing for Mass Communication (MMC 2100) — about 260 students. I wanted to help get the students into thinking about both the course and their potential careers in the media. So in addition to distributing the lecture syllabus, we spent part of the class talking […]