kosh's Page

Cheryl is on the left. My daughter and I are enjoying the 4th of July. Sorry this reply is so late.

Please join the "Global Lean"

blog at http://globallean.edublogs.org
AND NING http://globallean.ning.com

Give the world a voice in a joyful celebration of diversity!

Thanks! Peggy Sheehy

Hi Kosh,

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 'e-learning and online teaching' 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 a competition for startup funding 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 Kosh

Thanks for getting in touch - it's great to hear from you - please keep in touch

Hey Kosh,
I am into using media in education, and as a teacher I constantly draw on my 12 years working in the film industry, isn't a school like a big film production team!?
keep in touch, Good Luck,
Gavin

Hi Kosh...Because I teach in a Private School, with a large international population, Diversity is largely a part of the curriculum. My former colleague was born in Liberia, so that we were able to give the children a glimpse of all of the beauty of the continent without an overview of the strife, that we, as adults are all too much aware. Our school, is committed to begin the teaching of acceptance and service to our fellow man as early as our school begins...

My preschool students learn about Africa when I teach a major thematic unit on Big Cats of the World. Of course, we learn about Lions in Africa. We use the geography of the world as an introduction to the unit, learning that the world is made of air, land, and water. The three and four year old students are taught that all of the earth's land are called continents and that all of the earth's water are called oceans. We learn that we live on the continent of North America, and that we must cross the Atlantic Ocean to get to Africa. We then discuss the most effective mode of travel...for instance, do we drive there, sail there or fly there...The children through a series of exercises and activities, as well as some direct instruction, come to the conclusion that flying would be the most effective mode of transportation. We create a classroom airport for the trip and go on from there!

Hi Kosh,
Yes - I am an afficionado of African drumming and love to teach my pre-service music teachers about it! I have a friend from Ghana who often presents conference workshops on Ghanaian drumming/dance/singing - Kofi Goblonyo. Do you know of him? Would love to hear more about your music experience in Ghana.

No I don't. Sorry.