Lisa Burden's Page

Hi Lisa!

Happy New Year! I was wondering if your colleagues and students would be interested in participating in a nationwide SAT Vocab Video Contest @ MIT university. We'd really like to get more students involved from Texas!

You can view contest details at BrainyFlix.com Please let me know. Thanks!

Hi,

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. I found you when I searched for middle schools on classroom20, 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:

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, 2008, 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

Dear Lisa,

We already have the website of our project finished and we’d like to share it with you.

The goal of Bablingua is to offer good audiovisual materials filmed in Hispanic countries that can help teachers to enrich their classes. In the website there are short videos, long videos, vocabulary cards and a blog with free activities, games and new ideas for the foreign language class.

Please, visit us at : www.bablingua.com, and let us know your opinion, comments and ideas you have to improve it.

Alvaro and Laura

Bablingua

Hola Lisa!
I'm just getting started using wikis in my Spanish classroom & you have given me some great ideas! Thanks for sharing your wiki & your student's wiki with us.

That's great. Congratulations. I think a make-your-own-wiki workshop is a great way to get people excited about using this technology. With technology-reluctant people, personal applications (eportfolios, wikis for their own workshops, even hobby-oriented stuff, etc.) are very engaging.

Lisa, you've inspired me, reminded me why I actually took this job and I am going to work on it with your help this coming year. I want our teachers to use the internet to the students benefit and hopefully move them away from traditionally teaching.

I enjoyed reading your thoughts on "preaching to the choir," etc. Your wiki project sounds great. I had a similar experience with kids this year where I saw them really engaged in something and thought about how much that kind of engagement can change learning. I hope you do present your work at foreign language conferences -- more people need to see the power of engaging classroom projects.

Hi Lisa by the way the wiki is (wetpaints) and ive signed in
but not added anyone/or much yet ...
no suprise there then!! especially after yesterdays lesson
and last few weeks riduculous

Thanks! for your comment- interested what you said
so i feel i have little or no help in my school and for/ to think other places at least in UK, with league tables - academies in place in High schools
prus (pupil referal units)... so how is the foreigner or native speaker
suppose to pick up the threads and assist the kids. in the first place with a teacher whos both inadequate within his/her teaching and speaking a fair standard of english??

and some TEACHERS now or wwere looked at upon with pay (performance) related pay - its really a sad ( for me)
and very awkward situation being...an individual native English speaker (with teaching exp at home, but not qualified)
IF you have any advice following your comment on bulllying let me know
also ive had some info/advice from somone else on here

Jim

I agree with you this would be great to use and we can tell those who decide to help as well. We do have a high school teacher wanting to help. You can also teach us how to use wiki spaces. I am wondering if we can write a collective grant for the magazine ¿Qué tal? for the SPN I classrooms next year. Just a thought!!