Hi Julie! Hope you're enjoying the winter break. 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 Georgia students involved. Your state is very underrepresented amongst our userbase. Please let me know! Thanks!

Thanks for the quick reply! Below is a message that has been sent to educator listservs around the country. It has more details about the contest.

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Hello! I am contacting you on behalf of MIT university. We are running a nationwide contest in which students compete to produce fun, creative videos teaching SAT vocabulary. We're looking for short videos no longer than 2 min. To see an example, check out our contest website @ http://www.BrainyFlix.com.

Once the videos have been submitted, we'll allow viewers to vote on the videos, and we'll award $600 in prize money to the video that receives the most number of votes. $200 of the prize will go directly to the winner(s) and $400 to the class or school club chosen by that person(s). To further encourage participation, we'll give away 1 free iTunes song for every 5 videos a contestant submits or refers (up to the first 1,000 video submissions).

We will begin accepting video submissions starting January 1. You can sign up to receive an email reminder at http://www.BrainyFlix.com. Other important dates are shown below:
Video submission opens: 1/1/2009
Video submission ends: 2/23/2009
Voting opens: 3/1/2009
Voting ends: 3/14/2009
Winners announced: 3/20/2009

For more information, please visit http://www.BrainyFlix.com/main/contest_rules. For any inquiries that aren't answered there, contact Jack Yu at jack.yu.is@gmail.com.

We look forward to hearing from you and seeing some great flix!

Hey Julie,

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