Hi Melvina! Hope you're enjoying the winter break. I'm in Boston and we got dumped in snow, so I am very envious of you!

I was wondering if you, your colleagues, or students would be interested in a Vocab Video Contest @ MIT university. We'd really like to get Hawaii students involved. Please let me know! Thanks!

Hi Melvina,

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 have 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

Hey Melvina,

We're actually still working on the website right now-a better description should be up in the next few days. The description that's up on ideablob is also not geared towards teachers-it's a very general description of what we're doing made to fit within the 1000 character limit we were given.

The six of us have been doing a lot of research and user studies-talking to teachers, students, and parents to see where their values lie and what types of software would be most helpful to them. To add to that, we have an engineering bias which has been reinforced by much of the reading we've been doing on technology in education. This results in a very strong belief on our part that students need to have the technology that they use in their daily lives integrated with the learning environment that they are in. Thus, we would be doing two main things. We would incorporate technology into the learning environment by

1. acting as an aggregator that would bring some very useful web tools to the fingertips of students (things like google docs, digg, and wordpress blogging)
2. giving students a different medium (one that they likely already use in their daily lives) to actively (even passively) learn in.
3. giving teachers a simple and intuitive way to integrate this technology into their assignments

We would also be serving as a platform to increase and enhance communication between teachers, students, and parents. For students, in addition to keeping their schoolwork and study aids/information all in one place online, this would act as a social network in which students, teachers, and parents would be able to communicate. We understand that there are many security concerns with something like this, and we are in the process of addressing exactly how those interactions would need to occur so that security would not be an issue.

We've come up with a lot of ways to do this thus far, and right now we're in a stage where we're further defining ourselves and getting ready to throw out some designs of a few of the core features we expect to have. Keep in mind that all of these features and designs will be tested against the teachers, parents, students, and administrators at a few schools that have agreed to help us out with this project. We're still in a stage where we're very open to feedback and adjustments in our direction.

For a much shorter description, think blackboard/moodle, only
a. web-based so that individual teachers can sign up and use the site,
b. web 2.0 so that the site looks cleaner and is more intuitive - somewhere people /want/ to go when they're online
c. a different slant (which I've explained above), where we don't try to do everything and anything as blackboard does. We want to start out by doing just a few things, and do them well.

I'd love to have a conversation with you about this if you're still interested in the finer details of the project. More advice is always welcome!

Hello,
My name is Bill Hamlin and I'm a graduate student at Western Oregon University. I'm beginning a project on the uses of iPods in the classroom and might even be designing a college course for teachers on mobile learning. I've read some of the discussions in our Classroom 2.0 boards, but was wondering if you had any other advice. I was curious as to the process your school went through to obtain your ipod touches. I'm looking for a contact at Apple and possible grant opportunities to get a set for our university. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Bill Hamlin
whamlin@wou.edu

Hey, PHO soon??? YES!!!!! Hope your year is going well. I see you've joined the classroom 2.0 NING ... cheers,

Are you using Classroom 2.0 in your teaching this year?

Hey Melvina,

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 colleagues again?

Thanks,
Jack