Hi,

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 Marco Morales; 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. I found you when I searched for middle schools on classroom20, and since our project is specific to middle schools, 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, 2008, 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 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,

Marco Morales
marcotuts@gmail.com

Hi Erin. I was wondering if you and 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!

Erin, I felt teaching the big ideas from The Earth is Flat and A Whole New Mind generated excellent Socratic dialogue with the 7th and 8th graders as I framed it in the context of career planning. I struggled with teaching net ettiquite using the ePals software. The kids got too hung up on using the tool and I couldn't focus them on proper / improper net conduct...I'd teach that simple through dialgoue and example in the future. The kids struggled with the planning necessary in developing quality video pieces...I needed to spend more time modeling and and preparing for storyboarding and scriptwriting. The biggest hit of the class was a surprise...SCRATCH from MIT.edu. The kids had a blast learning how to program and make JibJab type videos...Good luck!