So, summer is nearly over and school will be starting soon. I often have great expectations of things I will accomplish in the summer, but I only get part of them done! I did take 3 workshops to acquire 3 credit hours. We attended 2 soccer tournaments, painted our living room, had a garage sale, and I learned how to buy/sell on Ebay! I enjoyed morning walks with my neighbor and took time to have a cup of coffee and a nap when I felt like it! Ahhhh, summer! Autumn is great too, as the weather cools and everyone is happy to see one another again. Soccer and football begin! One perk of teaching...we get TWO new starts every year. January 1, and the first day of school. Any new school year resolutions for you?

Hello,

I'm sending out messages to everyone I know right now, and this virtual Ning network is no exception. My name is Evan Morikawa. I am a 20 year old student from Olin College of Engineering (near Boston). I am a part of a group of six Olin students who are taking a year off to pursue interests in education, entrepreneurship, design and technology, which brought us to the logical project of a business that designs collaborative software for schools! I found you in a search for "middle school" on Classroom2.0, and since our project is specific to middle schools and uses new learning technology, I thought you might be interested. Our company is called AlightLearning, and this is our "short" project description:

We are working under the assumption that within ten years, the landscape of modern education will have fully integrated what we now define as new classroom media and tools: video, online collaboration, open source curriculum, and internet-based software. 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. More importantly, and unlike many of our competitors, our software will empower teachers to better integrate higher level thinking skills, individualized learning, goal setting, reflection, and effective feedback and evaluation. Our goal is to have our free software at a pilot middle school by April 15th, 2008, continuing to develop and coordinate with our users to create a product that other schools and individual teachers will want to use to improve their students' learning in and out of the classroom.

Our team 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. Note that winning this contest will raise $10,000, a large and useful sum of money for a web-based company running on “sweat equity” and minimal costs.

Feel free to email me back, post on my profile, check out alightlearning.com, or do anything you like!

Thanks,
Evan Morikawa
evan.morikawa@students.olin.edu

Hi Kim. I was wondering if your students would be interested in participating in a nationwide SAT Vocab Video Contest @ MIT university. If not, perhaps you have some educator contacts you could direct me to. You can view contest details at BrainyFlix.com Please let me know. Thanks!