George Somers's Page

Hey George

Our Brainyflix video contest just ended, and I wanted to thank you for helping us get the word out. We got 800 submissions from across the country!

That said, MIT was really happy with the results and will let us run another contest, so we're going for it! But this time, we're gonna have kids create Brainypics flashcards - which are images and sentences paired up with a one of our SAT/ACT words. The contest ends May 22nd, and there'll be iTunes and a cash prize like last time. To boot, we'll double the payout if the kids can hit a certain goal. More details at brainyflix.com/main/contest_rules.

Do you mind passing my message along to students and your HS colleagues again?

Thanks,
Jack

Cool. Thanks, George

Hi George. I was wondering if any of your students would be interested in participating in a nationwide SAT Vocab Video Contest @ MIT university. If not, perhaps you have some other educator contacts you could direct me to. You can view contest details at BrainyFlix.com Please let me know. Thanks!

Hi George,

I'm sending out messages to everyone I know right now, and this classroom20 network is no exception. (I've also sent this out on other Ning networks you may be a part of.) My name is Alyshia Olsen; I am a 20 year old college student from Olin College of Engineering. I am a part of a group of 6 Olin College students (we're in Needham, MA, and engineering students) who has taken a year off to work on an education related project. Since you are in the 'connecting content and technology' group, I thought you might be interested! Our project is called AlightLearning, and this is our "short" project description:

Under the assumption that within ten years, the landscape of modern education will have fully integrated what we now define as new classroom media: video, online collaboration, open source curriculum and other web tools, we hope to pioneer a web software tool that acts as a platform for this new media, bringing the power of the web and its tools to students, teachers and parents in a secure, comfortable and innovative environment. Our goal is to have our free software at a pilot middle school by April 15th, 2009, continuing to develop and coordinate with our users to create a product that other schools want to pilot and use at their schools, while allowing individual teachers to implement this tool in their own classroom.

Our project, titled Alight Learning, is currently trying to win an idea competition on Ideablob.com You can find us at http://ideablob.com/3975 . We would love your support in the form of a vote within the next couple days, but more importantly we'd love your feedback and comments. Our description on Ideablob is short, and even the one above hardly gets at many of the issues we would like to take a stab at solving, but at least it's a start.

Feel free to email me back, check out alightlearning.com, anything you like!

Thanks,

Alyshia Olsen
anotherdayaway42@gmail.com

Hi George,

We are know as SITACT Incorporated and we operate out of Chicago. You can
find more about us at www.sitact.ent. We are into developing virtual
learning environments and course settings so that it becomes easy to set up
an online course for a teacher. A sample of what we do can be seen at
www.lms.sitact.net . Please use the guest login
and use "frankieuncle" as the guest access code. What you will see in here
is a simple course that describes the software, but this course can be
designed to teach diverse subject matter to students. If you feel the kind
of work we are doing will be useful for you, we will be glad to work with
you setting up such virtual courses for collaborative dissemination and consumption of knowledge. Even if you didn't like the work we do, please let us know if we can do anything else for you.

Regards,
Sanjib

sanjib@sitact.net

Hi George,
Thanks for your comments on my lab! I do have a projector and a SMART board. I have the kids come in and sit on the carpet. I tell/explain to them their lesson before I turn them loose!
Thanks,
Amber

283 students PreK-8; Our school struggles, but they do what they can to keep us striving. The teachers are caught in an ink mode. Everything is printed. I have the same hats as you. I am the only tech person and I am new at it myself. I am responsible for every printer and computer in the school. I also am writing grants to try and update our classroom computers, (they are windows 95, and 98). I want to get the students networking, but thus far a Wiki is as far as I have been able to get our teachers.

On the forum you wrote that you are a computer lab teacher at a Catholic school. I am too. I just started writing some grants and I have many cool sites if you want any info let me know any specifics. What grades are you teaching?
Chrissy