An Upstate NY Teacher

Hi Lucas. I was wondering if you and your students would be interested in participating in a nationwide SAT Vocab Video Contest @ MIT university. If not, perhaps you have some educator contacts you could direct me to. You can view contest details at BrainyFlix.com Please let me know. Thanks!

Hello,

I'm sending out messages to everyone I know right now, and this virtual Ning network is no exception. My name is Andy Pethan. I am a 21 year old student from Olin College of Engineering. I am a part of a group of 6 Olin students (near Boston) who is 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,
Andy Pethan
rockychat3@gmail.com

Lucas,

Hi, this is Kevin. Hope your summer is going well and you had some time to relax.

I've started a new Ning network for Middle School Science Teachers and I thought you might like to join as you are also a m.s. science teacher. I thought it would be really good to have just middle school science teachers share some of their labs, demos, concerns, what works and what doesn't about teaching this level. Hope to see you there.

Thanks, Kevin

Brennan said…
Hi, I'm still doing a lit review. I have to finish reading this week and then organise the tasks/blogs.
I'm also going to use blogging in a class setting. I'll look at motivation, group interaction etc. I think I'll run it like an online journal - I'll get them blogging, adding images, playing with widgets and then choose (as a group) the best entries and post them on a central blog. That way they we can talk about content and look at issues around literacy.
The group is low achieving with a number of issues with literacy and a real dislike towards writing.
The research will be on the effects of the blooging on their attitudes and achievements and issues raised when using the blogs. I'll use a mixture of questions on a form and interviews at the start middle and end.
Martin

Lucas,
I expect students will be starting their blogging next week. I will try to remember and send you a link.

Rick