Fran Schlenoff's Page

Hi Fran. I was wondering if your students would be interested in participating in a nationwide SAT Vocab Video Contest @ MIT university. Perhaps you have some educator contacts you could direct me to. You can view contest details at BrainyFlix.com Please let me know. Thanks!

Look at that smile!!!! That's the one I see in NJ Monthly (leaving the Independent behind?)

How are things in Sparta? Let me know!!

Hello,

I'm sending out messages to everyone I know right now, and this virtual Ning network is no exception. My name is Ellen Chisa. 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 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,
Ellen Chisa
ellen.chisa@students.olin.edu

Hello Fran,

The World Mind Network would like to invite your classroom to become a ‘node’ in the FriendsBeyondBorders program.

There is no cost associated with this, and no work to be done by you. But the benefits can be considerable. We can link your students to teachers, experts, and other students in many fields from all over the world. The opportunities for sharing knowledge and experience, cross-pollination, and collaborating over new ideas are almost infinite.

The WMN is a group of teachers, scientists, artists, and professionals who believe that Internet technologies have made communication among millions of humans so varied, rich, and facile that our planet is becoming something like a Giant ‘Brain’.

But, just as a real brain has a complex set of procedures whereby only neuronal connections occur which accrue to the benefit of the whole organism, so we want to provide guidance to Web 2.0 communications so that those which encourage and inspire students to learn are emphasized. You can see the beta version of our website at worldmindnetwork.net.

Many of your students already are familiar with social networking because of websites like MySpace, Friendster, and Facebook (and of course Ning).
What the WMN does is to allow them to do WHAT THEY ALREADY WANT TO DO ANYWAY, but in a way which is both educational and fun.


On our Board of Advisors are Jeffrey Alexander, professor of Sociology at Yale, Irene Matusaka, Country Director of The Hunger Project in Uganda, Makalai Bell, Vice Chancellor of the Univeristy of Goroka in Papua New
Guinea, Ray Masson, professor of Education at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, Sohini Bhattacharya, Director of the Ashoka Project in India, Joanna Beresford of Appreciative Inquiry USA, and many others.


Our network is fully customizable. You decide who you want your students to communicate with. You can even ‘brand’ the network with your own name and have it hosted on Ning or elsewhere with your own content. In cases where computers are not available in the classroom or where permission from administrators is needed to add something new, students can access the network from their home computers.

If your students are doing a class project which uses social networking, blogging, wikis, podcasting, webcams, or video to connect with other students around the world in a way that is innovative, educational, and newsworthy, then we will, if you like, send press releases about the project to our network of publicity sites, including PressBox, Dimeco, PRlink, eWebWire, eWorld News, and many others. These are used by hundreds of journalists and submit their content daily to thousands of newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations, and blogs. This kind of exposure can be quite valuable to students who can cite it, for example, in their college applications.

Here’s why this is a ‘win-win-win’ situation for everyone: YOU can provide your pupils with a rich experience of Web 2.0 technologies without doing anything; your students make friends all over the world, learn the nuts and bolts of practical networking, and make influential contacts who will assist them in future educational and career endeavors, and WE build awareness of our programs.
All without any money changing hands.

Not only that, but if you and your students are doing something of visual interest which can inspire others around the world, we will send you, free of charge, a Logitech SLX webcam which streams full color sound and video at 30 frames per second. All we ask is that you set up the camera to display a LIVE feed, and that you stream the video to a site which we can link to (this is free, and we can show you how to do it.)

We have discovered that there is nothing like LIVE video to get students excited about the amazing cultural, scientific, environmental, and artistic things that are going on all over the planet right this minute.

Many of our members are especially interested in issues like Third World poverty, Climate Change, educational reform, cultural preservation, sustainable agriculture, social networking, technology transfer, and other things which are coming to define the 21st century. If your students are doing projects in areas like these, we can introduce them to people well-known in the field who can enrich their learning.
We don't want to be a burden on existing school activities, but rather to use our networking capabilities to give fresh relevance to what you are already doing. If appropriate, we also want to alert the world to the ground-breaking ways in which YOU are using Web 2.0 at school.
Let us know what you think. If you'd like to know more, visit the site, or Google "World Mind Network".

If you have questions, email us.

Regards,

Anna Chu Lin
Joanna Beresford
Ralph Chaudhury
World Mind Network
friendsbeyondborders@gmail.com

You couldn't get your work done before.

good you found it!

Fran!! I didn't know you were on here! Good to see you.