Hi Michael,

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 Alyshia,

Sounds like an interesting project. And yes, I agree....the landscape of education will certainly be different in 10 years...maybe sooner. I'll take a look at your website, and provide feedback soon. Good luck with your project, and feel free to email or send me a post anytime.

Mike

Hello Michael

I am a high school science teacher for 15 years. Due to district-wide budget constraints I will be moved from teaching physics to teaching chemistry next year.

I plan to use the summer months to get ready and I would like to integrate Classroom 2.0 effectively into my curriculum.



I hope to hear from you and others on this webste and to discuss and formulate ideas and methodologies to create a more inquiry-based approach to learning science in the 21st century classroom.