Be the change that you want to see

Hello,

My name is Todd Benrud and I’m a high school teacher in San Diego County, California.  The reason I’m contacting you is because of your background in education and finance.

In 2008 myself and three of my students started the Charity Student Investment Project. The goal of this not-for-profit organization is to teach students about personal finance, careers in finance and investing in the stock markets through the management of a real-money investment portfolio and while working with other students and industry professionals.

Currently the CSIP is only a handful of high school students at Grossmont High School, three college students and a professional mentor (Personal Financial Manger) that works for Morgan Stanley.  I’d like to get other students, teachers and professional mentors involved.

If you think this sounds like an interesting and/or you have students that may be interested please contact me at tbenrud@guhsd.net. You can also check out our site for more info - http://charitystudentinvestmentproject.com

Thank you for your time and consideration.
Have a great day!
Todd

Hey Bret,

Our Brainyflix video contest just ended, and I wanted to thank you for helping us get the word out. We got 800 submissions from across the country!

That said, MIT was really happy with the results and will let us run another contest, so we're going for it! But this time, we're gonna have kids create Brainypics flashcards - which are images and sentences paired up with a one of our SAT/ACT words. The contest ends May 22nd, and there'll be iTunes and a cash prize like last time. To boot, we'll double the payout if the kids can hit a certain goal. More details at brainyflix.com/main/contest_rules.

Do you mind passing my message along to students and your colleagues again?

Thanks,
Jack

Dynamic exchange between you and Will Richardson.
I read his post "Oh and You have a degree..." and then read your comments.
You both make some very strong points. Really good food for thought. I will share with my colleagues.

Have a happy new year!

Hi Bret,

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 have 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

Hi Bret! Hope you're enjoying the winter break. I was wondering if you, your educator contacts or students would be interested in participating in a Vocab Video Contest @ MIT university. We'd really like to get Illinois students involved. Please let me know. Thanks!

have you also noticed that the dates are off by a year? LOL I'm a History teacher so I notice those things immediately! Haha

good to hear from you. I have to say 'nice hat' too! LOL and the wind sock rocks as well! haha Happy Holidays and New Year to you! Friday's just a day a way and vacation is but a fortnight from then, but who's counting, right?