Aussie Andrew's page

Hi Andrew. I was wondering if your students would be interested in participating in a nationwide SAT Vocab Video Contest @ MIT university. 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 Evan Morikawa. I am a 20 year old student from Olin College of Engineering (near Boston). I am a part of a group of six Olin students who are taking a year off to pursue interests in education, entrepreneurship, design and technology, which brought us to the logical project of a business that designs collaborative software for schools! I found you in a search for "middle school" on Classroom2.0, and since our project is specific to middle schools and uses new learning technology, I thought you might be interested. Our company 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,
Evan Morikawa
evan.morikawa@students.olin.edu

Congrats on your new position! I have quite a few cousins who graduated from Jackson. It's a good school district.

Hi Andrew, thanks for the comment and the invite.

I'm currently completing the final 2 weeks of my postgrad teaching degree, but thanks for the offer of a practicum placement.

I see that you're heading back to the US in 2008, all the very best for the future!

Hi Andrew,
I stumbled upon your name whilst perusing the eschool.net.au website. What an outstanding resource! It's wonderful to see the meaningful employment of technology within Australian P-7 classrooms.

I'm currently completing my postgrad teaching studies (undergrad Bach Multimedia) and hope to achieve something similar during my teaching career. All the best for the future.

Hi Aussie Andrew. :)

Thanks for the comment and add. I had heard this was an awesome site, just didn't click it was on NING!! I just found NING last night, but because of the upgrades, I didn't get to surf around much. See you around!!

I try to share as much as I can. I have been fortunate to have PD opportunities many would kill for and an incredible network, nationally and globally of others who love to share too. Sharing, Learning, Collaborating, Networking, Friendships and much more is how I learned to learn all over again - and hey I am 45.
Stay in touch and I hope I can help in even a tiny way. I am off to your blog to read more of what you have been doing.
Regards
Jacinta