Hi!
Thanks for stopping by and joining in this discussion...
My name is Chris Jones and I am the founder of The Adventures of Tonto's Revenge a program designed to teach your students to explore. dream. discover.
Our program is very unique. I designed The Adventures in response to the state budget crisis in New York State. I am currently the president of the local Board of Education and I looked on in horror as the new state aid figures came out and the axe began to fall on neighboring school districts. Luckily our district had planned for situations like this and we will be able to weather the storm...for this year. However, other districts in New York, and other states I'm sure, aren't so lucky. The first programs that began to fall were field trips. In our area, most elementary classes went on two or three field trips per year. Now, that number has been reduced to one, or in some cases, none.
For the last few years, I have been spendng as many summer days as possible aboard my 25' sailboat, Tonto's Revenge. My wife and son enjoy sailing as much as I do and Adam would often return home and begin to tell his friends about our adventures. Their eyes would light up as they heard about our night anchored behind the ruins of a castle reportedly inhabited by indian ghosts, or the morning we stormed a Revolutionary War battlefield from the sea. I began to think that I had to find a way to take these kids with me, so they could experience the things that my son was. Of course, there is no way I could take dozens of kids with me on a sailboat...but, I could do it virtually. And The Adventures of Tonto's Revenge was born.
During this coming summer, we will be sailing the Hudson River from Albany to New York City, stopping at every "cool" place we come across. We'll be providing classrooms with 10 half-hour webisodes throughout the 2010-11 school year. The webisodes will be available for your class to view at any time during a one-week period. After that, we will join your class for a live video chat via Skype so the class can discuss what they've seen with us and we can get to know your students and tell them what we are currently up to. We'll also be sending emails, "Dispatches From Tonto's Revenge," each week to continue to challenge students to explore. dream. discover. Those three things form the basis of what The Adventures is all about...we are going to educate your students about interesting and historical people and places while also teaching them to focus on their dreams, and make them come true. Also, we believe that students need to have a personal stake in what they are learning, so we will show our committment to them by actually coming to your classroom to talk about where we've been and show them interesting things we've picked up along the way, let them taste some of the things they've heard about, and share their own, equally important, adventures with us.
We are in the formative "beta" stages of this project and the only thing holding us back from taking off faster is the ice on the mighty Hudson River. Our website has just gone live at www.theadventuresoftontosrevenge.ning.com and we are eagerly looking for ways to make it better. There's a lot of work to be done there, and any help is appreciated. We've also launched our Twitter account (@TontosRevenge) and will be posting progress updates there quite frequently.
Hopefully, you are ready to help your students join the adventure. Email me at tontosrevenge@frontier.com for even more information. Our program guide is available and we can get it out to you right away. It includes all the information you will need to have things rolling on the first day of school.
Once again, thanks for reading this, and thank you for everything you do for our kids.
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