Hello,

I'm sending out messages to everyone I know right now, and this virtual Ning network is no exception. My name is Andy Pethan. I am a 21 year old student from Olin College of Engineering. I am a part of a group of 6 Olin students (near Boston) who is taking a year off to pursue our interests in education, entrepreneurship, design and technology, bringing us to the logical project of a business that designs collaborative software for schools! I found you in a search for "middle school", 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:

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,
Andy Pethan
rockychat3@gmail.com

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

I am looking for a class that is interesting in a skype long distance debate with my class this semester. I teach 8th grade U.S. History. Last year we debated against Terry Parent's class out of Hollywood, California. The topic was Democratic Republicans vs. Federalists. I would like to repeat this event yearly. Perhaps even more than once a year. Anyone interested...especially a class in a time zone that is closer to us, please email me at susan.gorman@gcisd.net. I am in Central Time Zone. The time zone is important to consider because working with the class in California (I am in Texas) was a "juggle." Although, it was worth all of the effort.

Regards,
Susan