George Somers

, Male

United States

Profile Information:

School / Work Affiliation
Our Lady of Mercy School
Blog
http://georgevsserver.blogspot.com
Website
http://olmlancers.com/blog
Twitter / Plurk / Other Account
http://twitter.com/bigdogdaddy
About Me
I teach K-8 computers at a Catholic school in CA. I am looking for ways to maximize the small amount of technology access time the students have.

Comment Wall:

  • Kevin

    Welcome George! I am glad you joined Classroom 2.0. Some great discussions happen here and they just got better because you joined!
  • George Somers

    Thanks, Kevin. I look forward to learning a lot from this group and sharing ideas.
  • Nancy Bosch

    Hi George, I was looking at your AUP (nice job, by the way) and noticed a tiny typo. Thought you might like to know.... should be 100% safe, not save.
    "While OLM uses content filtering technology on all school computers with Internet access to protect against unacceptable web content, no web filtering technology is 100% save." N.
  • Chrissy

    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
  • Chrissy

    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.
  • George Somers

    For funding, try recycling used printer cartridges and cell phones withFunding Factory. It's a great program. We have raised nearly $20,000 since we started in Feb. 2002. If you have good parental support, it will be a great solution for you. Without it, I simply could not purchase new hardware.
  • Amber Coggin

    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
  • Sanjib Kumar Parida

    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
  • Alyshia Olsen

    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