It's always nice to see a familiar person!

April, have you looked at http://chitch.at? There was a recent discussion thread that mentioned this particular social network for use in schools. I've been investigating it and one of the things I am impressed with is the ability for me to make vocabulary, sentence, and grammar flashcards for students to drill/study and take a multiple choice quiz over.
This site might be something that other teachers (not just foreign language) may find useful.

Hello April,
Welcome to the Peer Coaching group. Hope we can learn and share together.

We at Millis High School are very strong in the field of Web 2.0 and 21st Century Learning. We currently have two classes at MHS. Advanced Web 2.0 and Standard Web 2.0. Last year was the pilot year for Web 2.0, and it went so well they carried the returning students over to Advanced Web 2.0. Our class has created as Wiki, http://milliswiki.wikispaces.com, which we worked on last year and it is now completed. What we would like to do is Skype with other classes to talk about Web 2.0 using our Wiki as a resource. For younger students we can talk to them about Internet safety. We are open to any educational effort so we can apply Skype to the classroom.

Hi April,

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 'e-learning and online teaching' 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 a competition for startup funding 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 April!

Hope you had a nice winter break. I was wondering if you or your students would be interested in participating in a nationwide SAT Vocab Video Contest @ MIT university. If not, perhaps you have some educator contacts you could direct me to. We'd really like to get students involved from Alabama!

You can view contest details at BrainyFlix.com Please let me know. Thanks!

We'll let anyone sutmit a video! But most likely, grades 10-12 would be most interested, though we have gotten middle school teachers interested and even an ambitious elementary school teacher or two. For more details, please go the contest rules at http://www/brainyflix.com/main/contest_rules

Hi, April. If my association with Elluminate can help you in any way, let me know.