Ian Carmichael's Page

Hi Ian,

With your interest in Web tools that engage students, I recommend you take a look at Wiziq's virtual classroom and authorstream's power point presentation platform. Both are web based platforms, have a bunch of features and free basic service. Here’s a public class recording conducted by Nellie Deutsch on Technology Integration.

Hi Ian,

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 'e-learning and online teaching' 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 a competition for startup funding 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

Hi Ian
You might be interested in viewing a presentation on Slide Share done by an ex Mt Gambier/Tenison Woods College person who is now teaching in Hong Kong. It is titled IWB's in the Secondary: Where is the Interaction?

Tasmania!!! that's exciting! I have heard it is very beautiful there! and kudos on teaching science and religion; I have a strong interest in teaching about issues related to religious literacy (especially related to sacred languages, translation, cultural history)... it's quite the mine field in America these days! :-)

Thanks for the headsup on Mary Midgely. Checking out her work will help with my affliction.....never having enough good stuff to read. LOL Have a great evening!

Ian:
I thought you might be interested in a topic of ethics that has always concerned me: "Humility and the Ethical Treatment of Your Fellow Travelers in this Life".

My parents were inspired by Lloyd C. Douglas, an American Congregationalist pastor who wrote "The Robe", "The Big Fisherman", "Magnificent Obsession" and other similar stories. His work affected their ideas and the way they raised us, and I was always impressed with his most important work (to me), "White Banners".

Recently, I discovered a similar philosopher/ethicist in Robert Fuller. He recently spent quite a period of time in Australia and the neighboring countries, so I thought you might have met him.

You had mentioned in an earlier spot that ethics and philosophy are important areas of engagement for you and your students, and I thought you might be interested in the work of Robert Fuller. Wikipedia has an entry on him, and I clipped a bit of it here: "Fuller has defined rankism as: 'abusive, discriminatory, or exploitative behavior towards people who have less power because of their lower rank in a particular hierarchy' "

He lectures and writes on this topic, the abuse of what he calls rankism. There is a group who supports his work by providing an online presence, so I went to their website: http://www.breakingranks.net. A really nice website.

Last time I went to Barnes and Noble I found his first book on this subject concerning ethical behavior in modern times: "Somebodies and Nobodies: Overcoming the Abuse of Rank"

So, I want to share with people who have also indicated an interest in developing and maintaining positive ethics among teachers, students and their community.

Click on it and you should be able to get the big one!! http://connections.smsd.org/veterans/reception_photos.htm I have another one that tickles me, too. From Talk Like A Pirate Day. http://connections.smsd.org/el/pirates%20018.jpg

Thanks for the photo of the cart-laden dish! Here is another one I've always loved, 7 years ago we interviewed 54 WWII veterans...after the 6 months long project we had a reception for the veterans and showed them the website---here is picture of Ralph S. using a computer for the first time, looking at the stories and interviews we published to the web. http://connections.smsd.org/veterans/shack2.jpg

Thanks for the Wallace and Grommit video clip! It's a perfect encapsulation of what I was trying to say in my last blog post. Do you mind if I embed it at my blog?

You mentioned wanting to "see" some pictures of growth and success -- do you mean in the area of visionary web policy?

If so, that is the problem, there just aren't a lot of solid models out there. I have uncovered a few interesting resources in the last few days -- I'll post some links at my blog for you to take a look.

In the interim, Will Richardson conducted a chat yesterday at the National School Board Association web site, and I asked him specifically about sharing model policies. You can read what he says in the transcript posted at the NSBA web site. His response suggests to me that what you are doing with your own faculty on Ning is the best approach (rather than drafting layer upon layer of policy).