Danny Shields's Page

Hi Danny,

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 has 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,,
thanks for inviting me as a friend. i am not yet teacher but if god permits me to continue with my studies i wanna be a good teacher. i am a sophomore student of education right now and maybe you can be of great help to a student like me.
mandy.

Added you on as a friend, Danny. I hope to be posting more once school starts up again in July!

Hi, Danny! Thanks for the add! =)

Danny,

Thanks for making the contact with me. I had been a Technology Coordinator at Harper High School (CPS) in West Englewood, and in that capacity, I did get the school up to 92% network compliance. I pushed for professional development constantly, as well as making our network available to as many students and teachers as possible. I was relieved of my position 2 weeks before the school year began last August by our new principal. I had hoped for change, as the previous principal was a good day to day bureaucrat, but had no vision for the school's growing technology and its use. When the new principal came on board, I had hoped, that because she was young (35), I would have someone I could really work with and push my agenda. Instead, she put me back in the classroom (all freshman English -- horrible creatures they are) and then she brought in an outside vendor who she paid an hourly wage. He proceeded to gut the network I had worked hard to help grow. He left computers unprotected, and she allowed labs to become game and video rooms.

I received my MS in Ed with a Focus in Technology Integration 2 years ago, but working with Administrators who are not tech savvy seems to be one of the primary barriers to progress once the hardware and infrastructure is in place.

Now thanks to the great minds at Central Office, they have fired the entire staff, retaining a handful of teachers and career service personnel, and of course, the Administrators they gave Harper last August. The school is being touted as a "turn-around" school.
I'm looking for a job.

I'm new to this site and enjoying seeing what's available. :)

Beth

Hi Danny
Hope you find interesting things on my pages
Montse