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 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. 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 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 Robert!

Hope you're enjoying the winter break. I was wondering if you, your educator contacts or students would be interested in participating in a nationwide Vocab Video Contest @ MIT university. We'd really like to get more students involved from California!

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

Hi Robert,

With your interest in Education Technology integration, I recommend you take a look at Wiziq's virtual classroom and authorstream's power point presentation platform. Both are web based platforms, have a bunch of features and free basic service.

Sweet! Thanks, Robert!

Hi Robert! We would love to reach out to Southern California! I was in fact just there last week! I have some great people on my team who specialize in middle school literacy and travel easily. We are also experimenting with some cool ways to keep in touch between visits via videochats, etc. If you think your school might be interested in having us come out, please let me know and I'd be happy to make contact with whomever you think might be best. I am really glad you reached out and I really like your blogs I've read so far. So wise and funny and intuitive! I'd love to know more about what you are doing with your students in the technology/literacy area. I'd love to connect you with my team; maybe one of these days via Internet for sure. Thanks so much for writing.

Hi! Nice to meet you.