Hi,

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 Marco Morales; 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. I found you when I searched for middle schools on classroom20, and since our project is specific to middle schools, 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, 2008, 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 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,

Marco Morales
marcotuts@gmail.com

I like your newspaper idea a lot. We've been talking a lot about different kinds of communication, including the "mass" communication that happens in schools (newspapers, newsletters, principal's blog, permission slips, etc). The concept of RSS is simply pushing information that people are interested in to the top of their list of things to look at, and I think we're planning to do something similar to that. The part we hadn't talked much about is the student involvement in publishing these widespread communications, something I think would be awesome. When we get a little further along, we will be sure to contact you again to try it out and give us some feedback!

I will check that out. The primary reason we think "new media" is so important is because it hits so many of the physical senses, but that book sounds like it would add a new level to that. Thanks!

Hi Art! Hope you're enjoying the winter break. I was wondering if you, your educator contacts or students would be interested in participating in a Vocab Video Contest @ MIT university. We'd really like to get Alaska students involved. Please let me know. Thanks!

Art, I just checked your wiki site out. I love it, you give your students a lot of voice!!! I loved the mid-year comments page, what a great idea. I would love to know more about what was working for you with the wiki and what you would like to see improve. Thanks for responding to the wiki discussion.

Hello Art,
I just looked at your wiki. I am a new wiki user myself. I teach adult basic ed to new immigrants and to those working toward their GED. I invite you to look at my wiki posted on my page. My wiki (pbwiki.com) has comment sections for each page created which makes it easier for students to comment on a page and for you to reply to their comments or for other students to reply as well.
Are you managing your whole school wiki?
Thanks for sharing.