We are a homeschooling family that is 8 years into an open ended trip around the world and blogging about our experiences as we go. We have done some collaboration via 2.0 world-as-classroom options and looking for more and learning more about the opportunities, sharing and connection.
Monolingual American parents, trilingual/triliterate tween ( Mandarin/Spanish/English) who plays violin, piano and sings/writes songs as we roam..into math, the environment too!
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!
I am off from New Zealand to United Arab Emirates shortly.
My family is joining me in October, we hope to "hop" over to Europe and some other countires while we are there.
I look forward to following your journey and sharing mine.
My blog is at: http://globalmantra.blogspot.com
cya,
Gavin
Congratulations on living the dream. So many think about traveling the world, so few do it.
My wife and I took an around the world honeymoon and created memories that have lasted 32 years (to date). You are putting gold in the memory bank that's for sure.
When we traveled there was no internet or cell phones. We found our way into the deep mountains and jungles.
A nice prep for a career in education.
Thanks for the friendship offer! I look forward to learning more about you and your adventures!
Thanks too for joining the E-Learning and Online teaching group. I'm teaching 4 classes of new online teachers at the moment so my focus is on my students... but I'll get back to the group soon!
Thank you Khandijah & Talia! What a nice welcome! I really enjoyed looking at both your blogs as well.
It really has been an amazing journey so far and suits us to a T. We sold everything to do this ( which was a BIG decision years in the making), but find it is easier than we expected. Making the decision and all the prep was the hard part, but todays world actually makes it quite easy to be a global nomad.
We find that we can live MUCH cheaper traveling the world, than we could at home.We live frugally like natives on just 25K a year and could do it for much less, but we like some luxurious splurges.
The 7 months of travel and 5 months of rest in one place where we do a deeper immersion, also has worked out better than expected. Last year when we first arrived in our little village, I felt like a stranger in a strange land, but now it feels like home and it will be hard when we do not come back here to winter.
We have learned so much in so many ways & want to share that with others!
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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
My family is joining me in October, we hope to "hop" over to Europe and some other countires while we are there.
I look forward to following your journey and sharing mine.
My blog is at: http://globalmantra.blogspot.com
cya,
Gavin
My wife and I took an around the world honeymoon and created memories that have lasted 32 years (to date). You are putting gold in the memory bank that's for sure.
When we traveled there was no internet or cell phones. We found our way into the deep mountains and jungles.
A nice prep for a career in education.
Thanks for the friendship offer! I look forward to learning more about you and your adventures!
Thanks too for joining the E-Learning and Online teaching group. I'm teaching 4 classes of new online teachers at the moment so my focus is on my students... but I'll get back to the group soon!
Dennis
Greetings
Hans
It really has been an amazing journey so far and suits us to a T. We sold everything to do this ( which was a BIG decision years in the making), but find it is easier than we expected. Making the decision and all the prep was the hard part, but todays world actually makes it quite easy to be a global nomad.
We find that we can live MUCH cheaper traveling the world, than we could at home.We live frugally like natives on just 25K a year and could do it for much less, but we like some luxurious splurges.
The 7 months of travel and 5 months of rest in one place where we do a deeper immersion, also has worked out better than expected. Last year when we first arrived in our little village, I felt like a stranger in a strange land, but now it feels like home and it will be hard when we do not come back here to winter.
We have learned so much in so many ways & want to share that with others!