Technology Integration for Everyone

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

Hi Dean,

I'm sending out messages to everyone I know right now, and this classroom20 network is no exception. My name is Marco Morales; 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 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,

Marco Morales
marcotuts@gmail.com

Hey, Dean. I've enjoyed looking through your posts and resources. Good stuff. I predict that our paths will cross again.

All the best,
Clif
http://clifmims.com

Thanks for sharing this site with us today at the ESSDACK TIG workshop. I am in the process of creating my page!

Dean, I attended the Essdack workshop on Loti. I would be interested in what you are doing in Lyons at the K-5 level with Web 2.0. What sites are you using, etc...

Yes, I completely agree with you! I wish that our tech guys would open it for students to use! They say that since "Watchguard" says it is not safe, then we couldn't possibly use it! Anyway...maybe one day! Thanks!

Great! I will keep you in mind when we open it up to parents. It is coming along, slowly. We will see what happens at grade card time!

Hey,

I am just writing to ask what your opinion of ning.com is for the classroom. I made a ning website for my 1st grade classroom. At first, our firewall was not blocking the site. Now it is, listing it as a "personals and dating". I am having a super hard time with my tech. guys. They can't figure out where the pictures, videos, etc. are posted (IP addresses) to "unblock" them from our Firewall (Watchguard). It is unfortunate that they will not unblock the site. They have given me permission to log in without the firewall to show the site to my kids, so we can look at things. However, I wanted to have sites for my teachers and other classrooms...they will not allow everyone to do this. Do you deal with these kind of issues in your district?

Hey Dean!

I have a contact in Maize (Kansas) who is willing to do a project using VoiceThread. She's going to send me a Teddy bear and I'll take picutres of the bear around the school, which the kids can comment on through voicethread and send to her. Then the Teddy gets sent on to someone else. Think any of your teachers might be interested? or someone on a worldwide scale?
Let me know......
Pete