Russ Wilcox's Page

Hi Russ,

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

Hello! I am inviting parents, teachers and students from all over the planet to join and introduce to their students the network for connecting students globally. I think you may like to join my vision. Please visit: http://kids4kids.ning.com/
You and your kids can be the first representatives of Pittsburg, KS...!

Hey Russ
I have a neice at Pittsburg State, I am a ms computer/english/math teacher. The computers are my favorite part of teaching, but I do the other so that I can teach computers. Our district is extremely small, so when it comes to teaching technology, or training teachers, we do most of it ourselves. I am looking into doing podcasting with my middleschoolers this next year, we shall see.

When it comes to getting veteran teachers to use technology it sometimes can be very challenging. This is where our (Generation YES) philosophy has proven success. The program involves partnering up a GenYES student with a teacher in the school (many times a reluctant veteran teacher). The "partner teacher" and GenYES student together develop a lesson plan involving technology. In this situation the teacher is not expected to be the expert with technology and allows the student to show teachers how to use the technology in an effective way.
We have many GenYES schools in Kansas. Where in Kansas are you located?

Hi Russ, yeah we should be on the watch for what each other is doing. What stinks about my position is that, while I can set goals, they are often overshadowed by district initiatives that come my way from our 10 districts! Our projects often crawl forward or lose ground totally.

I'm in the process right now of trying to align some of my goals in a more general sense to, hopefully, address our districts goals.

Do keep in touch. Maybe there is a project out there we can collaborate on?

Hi, Russ! It sounds like you have a GREAT and challenging job! Looking forward to networking with you.

Hey Russ !