Hi Friends,
Thank you for a great session the other day! For those of you who couldn’t make it, here’s a rundown of the meeting:
First, I passed on some information from Stacy Katz, another Rebus facilitator, for a Call for Participants for a summer institute at CUNY. Per the CFP, “Emphasizing active learning, place-based scholarship, and an engagement with new forms of digital publication, the Open Education Publishing Institute seeks projects that incorporate historically marginalized knowledges, with a particular focus on projects that go beyond providing free course materials to those that actively engage students as co-producers of open, public-facing resources.” If you’re interested in applying, details can be found here.
Also, if you would like a refresher or more of a deep dive into diversity, equity, & inclusion; universal design for learning; H5P interactivity; accessibility; and co-creating OER with students, then Rebus has partnered with ROTEL to offer some spring webinars.
After news and notes, we reviewed some upcoming deadlines. According to Production Timeline, this is the week you should have at least the first half of final draft chapters completed and put into your Google Drive folder set up by PST. If you are having difficulty gaining access to that folder, please reach out to Barbara for help. With Rounds 1 and 2 just about done, PST is excited to read drafts of your chapters. We had conversations during the session about how we know you all want your chapters to be just perfect, but it’s also important to find a stopping point and submit those, knowing that you can make small updates later or larger modifications in future iterations. In other words, get those chapters in 
. PST would also like a Table of Contents document placed into your folders. The TOC will give them a sense of what/how much to expect and the order of your chapters.
With that, a celebratory high five to ROTEL, PST, and the stellar faculty authors for the new publications that were recently released! We took at look at three of these texts during our session, and I noted a few things that might be helpful as you are drafting or polishing chapters:
In Yvonne Anthony’s Statistics Through an Equity Lens, notice the charts, graphs, & images that break up the blocks of text, the gentle and inviting language for activities “Now Try It Yourself,” and the shaded boxes that integrate real-world data, whereby students are asked to ‘apply the equity lens.’
We also looked at Sandra Garvey’s The Early Literacy Journey: Supporting and Celebrating Young Learners. Sandra does a great job of using a repeating structure for sub-sections of chapters and places key takeaways in its own sub-section. She also incorporates Pause and Reflect activities that utilize authentic situations and ask students to apply reading concepts to those.
To round things out, we briefly explored Kisha Tracy’s Heritages of Change: Curatorial Activism and First-Year Writing, which has a beautiful front cover. Kisha uses some repeating elements as part of her table of contents (What & Why questions, final thoughts, and further readings). She also has a really thoughtful About This Book section, a lot of embedded media, and some really fabulous H5P exercises.
Then we turned our attention to Megan Murphy’s sample chapter for a bit of workshopping. Kudos to Megan for allowing us a peek into her community text that will feature a number of real-world experiences from various stakeholders. Megan found relevant information from Kisha’s text to integrate into hers (yay!) and received feedback from folks in session. Devan, too, has been extremely busy over winter break and shared his completion chart (wow!). And Jessica has been hard at work on her chapters with 6 now completed (again, wow!).
Next week and for the month of February, we return to a weekly cadence. I look forward to seeing and hearing any updates from your end. I know you are all working extremely hard while balancing work and family lives.
Thank you for all that you do and see you on Tuesday!
Sincerely,
Amy
