Hi Patricia,

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

Hey Patricia,

Thanks for the comment! To answer your questions: we tried to start out with a relatively small user group (the 6 of us are doing the bulk of the coding ourselves, so we wanted a user group where we wouldn't have to worry about variations on features for different age groups and types of schools). We chose middle schools because the age gap is the smallest in those schools, middle schools are right in between high school and elementary schools, so we shouldn't have to alter our software tool too much going either way, and because studies have shown that middle school is the age group where students begin to use computers and establish an identity on the web.

In our initial stages, we are not providing the content. Instead, we envision our software tool acting as a platform for user generated content, as well as for software tools that are already on the web (google tools for school, digg, and wordpress blogs, for example), as well as a platform for teachers, students and parents to communicate more openly and freely, thus connecting a students home life with their learning environment.

We are still in the very initial stages of planning out the site, and as a coding project, all of the features that we would like to ideally include will take more time than the April 15th deadline we have set for ourselves. The initial pilots will be available to individual teachers(for all age groups, but keep in mind the software is intended for middle schoolers) as well as schools, but will be in a very pre-beta stage. This will be entirely web-based, so there will be no downloads necessary--we hope to create something that is much easier to use for all parties than current options such as blackboard and moodle.

If you have any more advice for the direction of the project, it would be much appreciated. The team is on a short christmas holiday right now, but we'll be back in the thick of it come January, and you'll probably be hearing more from us then if you're still interested in helping out, or even being part of our initial pilot.

Please e-mail me or comment if you have any more thoughts on the project!

Thanks,

Alyshia

Hey Patricia,

Thanks for the comment! To answer your questions: we tried to start out with a relatively small user group (the 6 of us are doing the bulk of the coding ourselves, so we wanted a user group where we wouldn't have to worry about variations on features for different age groups and types of schools).

We chose middle schools because the age gap is the smallest in those schools, middle schools are right in between high school and elementary schools, so we shouldn't have to alter our software tool too much going either way, and because studies have shown that middle school is the age group where students begin to use computers and establish an identity on the web. In our initial stages, we are not providing the content. Instead, we envision our software tool acting as a platform for user generated content, as well as for software tools that are already on the web (google tools for school, digg, and wordpress blogs, for example), as well as a platform for teachers, students and parents to communicate more openly and freely, thus connecting a students home life with their learning environment.

We are still in the very initial stages of planning out the site, and as a coding project, all of the features that we would like to ideally include will take more time than the April 15th deadline we have set for ourselves. The initial pilots will be available to individual teachers (for all age groups, but keep in mind the software is intended for middle schoolers) as well as schools, but will be in a very pre-beta stage. This will be entirely web-based, so there will be no downloads necessary--we hope to create something that is much easier to use for all parties than current options such as blackboard and moodle.

If you have any more advice for the direction of the project, it would be much appreciated. The team is on a short christmas holiday right now, but we'll be back in the thick of it come January, and you'll probably be hearing more from us then if you're still interested in helping out, or even being part of our initial pilot.

Please e-mail me or comment if you have any more thoughts on the project!
Thanks,

Alyshia