Hopefully you've noticed the fancy new logo for our BITeS feature. I would like to thank my friends Hilary Eppley and Lori Watson for their efforts in the redesign. So far I have really enjoyed reading the various posts that have appeared in BITeS. I'll let you the reader in on a little bit of inside information. When the idea of BITeS was first proposed, it took a bit of convincing to get the full support of the leadership council. So our initial logo was very low tech. But eventually the leadership council came around and BITeS has continued to grow. Based on the number of views and comments, it seems like it is a welcome addition to VIPEr.

In fact, it turns out that many people actually wanted us to start something like BITeS. You may recall that you received a survey about VIPEr use in late 2013. We had well over 100 responses to that survey and the leadership council is busy mining that data to see what we can do to make VIPEr an even better community. One comment that we have seen multiple times is that we need some kind of weekly update of what's new at VIPEr. We hope BITeS will serve that purpose. Sure, it will continue to provide updates about places you might encounter the leadership council (our workshop, our two trips to Canada this summer, BCCE, etc), but we will also be using it to highlight new (and not so new) LOs and stories from class. I really liked Lori's post about mechanism skits. It made me wish I had feet.

Slitheringly yours,

Flo