Getting Started

Getting Situated: Joining Perusall and Saying Hello

I am excited to start working together this semester!

Please email me with any questions if you get stuck on any of these tasks. Happy to help anytime: kjaxon@csuchico.edu

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First week: Jan 24-28

Our goal this week is to join accounts, get situated, jump into some reading and writing. Some of you already know that I am committed to using platforms that exist in the world, platforms you can use for teaching and learning after you leave Chico State. Reach out to me if something goes wonky while joining; if you’re feeling frustrated, just email me. I really am happy to help. We can even jump on Zoom and share a screen. This usually goes very smoothly, so I’m not worried and you should not be either. Thank you in advance for trying things out!

Up first:

1) Bookmark our course website so you can find it easily this semester (optional; just might make your life easier). Here are instructions for Chrome (but you can also google “how to add a bookmark in Safari, Firefox,” etc if you’re not sure how to add a bookmark to your browser).

2) Join Perusall to find and comment on our course readings. Instructions:

• • • Go to perusall.com, click Login, and then either log in using your Facebook, Twitter, or Google account, or create an account using your email address and password.
    • Select I am a student and enter our course code JAXON-78JBA
    • That’s it for now: we’ll try this out together in our first week of class (a short walkthrough video below too if you’re interested in seeing how we’ll use this site).

3) Add your face to our shared google slides. Since we’ll all be in masks, I thought it might be nice to see full faces in pictures. I’m thinking we can create a shared slide deck and have it up while we do introductions during our first class session. Would you mind adding a photo or photos of yourselves in our shared Google slides? I made an example slide, but feel free to freestyle and ignore my example: Link to slides here. If you could do this before our class session on Thursday at 5:00pm that would be amazing. And yes, I realize that choosing a photo to share of yourself on this slide deck might be the hardest thing all semester. 😉 Thank you for humoring me!

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We will talk about the book club choices in our first class session. When you know which book you want, take survey: link here

*BTW: the second question on the survey asks “How are you?” NOT “How old are you?”

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More support for Perusall:

Throughout the semester, we’ll comment on readings together in a platform called Perusall. In a nutshell, we are working like I work with colleagues when we read together: we are reading and sharing comments collaboratively. Some readings you’ll have more to say than others, but I hope you see the comments as a generous act for our community: you can pose a question, link to something an idea reminds you of, try to summarize a challenging sentence or section, define a term, consider how the researchers conducted the study, etc. I also really appreciate when we respond to other people’s comments, perhaps engaging in a dialogue or trying to answer someone’s question. I created a short video below (for my literacy studies class, but exactly the same thing we’ll be doing with different readings). Hopefully the video helps explain what we’re doing with Perusall. To join Perusall, see instructions above. We’ll play in Perusall during our first class session too and I can help: no worries!