Hi Becky,
I am teaching a graduate course in technology for teachers who are studying to become principals. One of my students is from your country. His name is Nengi Halliday and he is from River State. He was very excited to learn that we are communicating with each other.

How is your teaching going? What are your students like? Are you finding it difficult or easy?

I don't know if you have been reading about the financial problems in the US. People here are very worried that the entire economy could collapse. I have just been reading about banks and insurance companies going broke in the UK and Europe too. I know that the economy of Nigeria is different in many ways from the US and Europe, but also I know that there are many connections between American and European companies and your country. Has this economic trouble in the US has an impact in Nigeria recently?

I and my family are well and there is no immediate threat to our day to day living or my job -- but we are still worried about the future.

OK. Enough of my worries. When you get some time, please write and tell me how your teaching is going.

Sincerely,
Jim Lerman

Hi Becky,

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. 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

hi Rebecca,
will you be interested to contribute a book chapter of your teaching experience.Please visit my profile for the book chapter invitation.
A response is solicited.
tamishra