VLA Offers Financial Literacy

Amended Substitute Senate Bill 311, also known as the Ohio Core, requires integration of economics and financial literacy within social studies classes or another class. The financial literacy requirement of the Ohio Core (Am. Sub. S.B. 311) is effective with freshmen who enroll in high school on or after July 1, 2010 – the graduating class of 2014.

The VLA Financial Literacy semester course will be available for Fall enrollments. For more information, please contact Shaye Casper at shaye.casper@omeresa.net or 740-283-3347. You can visit the ODE website for additional information at(http://www.ode.state.oh.us).

System Upgrade - August 1, 2011

Attention: The VLA system will be down on Monday August 1, from 6:30 AM to 8:00 AM (EST) due to an upgrade. Thank you for your patience. If you have any questions, please contact our office.

System Upgrade Information

The system was upgraded early this morning. We've had reports of a couple of errors.

Email

Some teachers and students are getting a parse error when a new email is launched. Our software developers are working on fixing this error.

Security Warnings

A security warning box is appearing every time a page is refreshed. While this will be permanently fixed, you can temporarily work around it.

• Internet Explorer 7 users should click the YES option.


• Internet Explorer 8 users should click the NO option.

If you choose the wrong option the first time, you'll need to close your browser window, launch a new browser window, and log in again.

Answers Not Being Saved

This is tied to the security warning issue above. Choose the proper security answer, and you should be able to save. If you've chosen a different option in the past, you'll need to clear your browsing history before you restart your browser. To do this, click Tools > Internet Options > Browsing History > Delete. Then close your browser window. When you reopen your browser window, you will be able to select the proper security warning box option.

If you have any questions about any of these issues, please let us know.

PowerPoint 2007 Viewer for Teachers

If your students are using PowerPoint to send you projects and presentations, you may find yourself stuck with a compatibility issue. Some students have upgraded to Microsoft Office 2007. If you haven't upgraded but need to view a student project, you can download the PowerPoint 2007 Viewer from Microsoft to solve the problem.

Note: If you're teaching the PowerPoint 2007 course, owning the PowerPoint 2007 software is crucial. This post does not refer to those teachers, only teachers who receive a PowerPoint project from students from time to time.

Thanks to Sharon for finding this tool!

Webinars: Keeping Up with Changes in Education

Keeping up with your own classroom can be a daunting task. Keeping up with the changes happening in education can be next-to-impossible. Education is changing at such a rapid pace. How are teachers supposed to keep up?

One way that you can keep up with innovations and and changes in education is through webinars. Webinars are seminars that are conducted in an online environment. There are webinars offered by companies wishing to showcase new products and organizations wanting to share information. Some webinars are free; others carry registration fees.

The biggest webinar attendance obstacle for most teachers is time. Oftentimes these webinars are held during the school day when teachers are in class.

I have two pieces of good news for you if you're interested in participating in webinars but are unable to attend due to time conflicts. First, some organizations are starting to offer webinars after school hours. iNACOL (International Association for K-12 Online Learning) offers monthly Teacher Talk webinars. These are usually held from 6:00 to 7:00 p.m., allowing teachers to participate. There are fees attached to the iNACOL webinars, but they are usually worthwhile.

The other piece of good news is that many webinars are being offered for archived viewing after the webinar takes place. Webinars are recorded and then offered for playback at your convenience. Time conflicts disappear when you're able to view webinars at your leisure.

There are benefits and drawbacks to viewing archived webinars. The obvious benefit is that you don't have to view them at their originally scheduled time. The drawback is that you can't interact with the presenters or other participants. You'll need to determine how you like to learn and choose the option that best suits your style.

Below are some sites that are offering webinars. Feel free to investigate one or several of them. I'll be updating you on any high-quality offerings that I see. Feel free to leave a comment below or email me (jennifer.bruce@omeresa.net) if you see other webinars that you think might benefit online teachers.

• iNACOL (fee)
  These Monthly Teacher Talk Webinars focus on online learning or online resources for the classroom teachers. Past topics include working online with at-risk students, online resources for various subjects, project-based learning, Google tools, and more.
  


• eSchoolNews (free)
  These are held at least twice each month. Past topics have included incorporating technology in today's classroom, becoming a tech-savvy educator, serving students on the Autism spectrum, using mobile technologies, and more. You can view many of the archived webinars on the eSchoolNews website.
  


• Michigan Virtual University (free)
  These monthly webinars feature online learning experts from all over. Past topics include how students perform in online courses, the process of processing information, engaging online students, teacher tone in online learning, the National Technology Plan, and more.

Welcome New VLA Teachers!

We held our yearly Virtual Learning Academy teacher training today and welcomed 22 new teachers to our team. We hope that you all enjoy working with students in this learning environment. We're here to support you as you begin this adventure, so please don't hesitate to contact us.

eTech Webinar Series Recorded Archives

Update: It looks like eTech is no longer hosting the webinar archives. Please see the post about where to find webinars and webinar archives if you're interested in participating in webinars.

I received messages back from some of you mentioning that you weren't able to attend the eTech webinars due to teaching schedules. Good news! You have a second chance to participate. eTech is offering the recordings of the webinars on their Webinar Archive page. You can view each week's recording as if you had been there.

I highly recommend this week's session, Beyond Chalk. The presenter was inspiring! He shared ways to use technology, not as the focal point of instruction, but as a tool to increase the relevance of the instruction and the engagement of the students. It's worth the hour to watch the archived session.

Check back on the eTech archive page each week for a new recording.

FREE Webinars for Ohio Teachers

If you're one of our local Ohio VLA teachers, you might be interested in the free webinar series that's being offered by eTech during the month of May. The webinar topics include the following:

• Beyond Chalk
  Tuesday, May 4 (12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m.)
  Be exposed to examples of how other teachers have effectively applied technology in the classroom, see the value of technology from the perspective of student engagement, start to determine the difference between hype and reality, and challenge yourself to embrace one thing in the coming weeks of your journey in the development of the 21st Century classroom.



• Personal Learning Networks
  Tuesday, May 11 (11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.)
  See samples of successful online communities, learn how to create an online community, and understand how to support and build an online community.



• 21st Century Readiness for Every Student
  Tuesday, May 18 (12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m.)
  Learn why the global innovation economy requires a new model for education, learn why "fusing the three Rs with the four Cs is a critical step, see what districts that are undertaking 21st Century education are doing to launch their initiatives, and understand why policy is an important ingredient for 21st Century education.



• It's About the Achievement! Using Assessment Tools and Data to Improve Student Achievement
  Tuesday, May 25 (11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.)
  Understand the OLAC model for school improvement, be familiar with the tools provided at the OLAC website, understand the value and unique nature of the most recent version of the MeasureUp tool, understand the value of combining data from the Success website, the Value Added website, and using a program called "Value Added Golf."

It looks like eTech has chosen topics that are very relevant to us today! You can find more information about the sessions and how to log in on the eTech Ohio Webinars website.

Just for Fun - A Little Inspiration

Tips for Teaching in the Online Classrooms of the Future

I received a link to this article from one of my co-workers today, and I thought it was valuable enough to share. The article is Tips for Teaching in the Online Classrooms of the Future published by Converge Magazine.


The article contains valuable tips for connecting with students. Many are applicable to teaching in the VLA environment; some are geared toward more traditionally-structured online courses. Most of you will probably be able to give yourselves a little pat on the back after reading the article, as you're already doing many of these tasks.

Be sure to read the About the Author line at the end.

Photo Credit

Attachment Issues

There have been a handful of reports of students not being able to attach documents to questions. If this happens with your students, have them switch from the split-screen view to the questions view. They can do this by clicking the questions icon on the left side of their screens.

Once they are in Questions view, they should be able to attach the files.

This issue should be resolved in our next software upgrade, but this work-around should make the process work for students in the meantime.

How to Handle Different Word Processing Programs

If you teach any courses where students are required to submit word processing documents, you've no doubt run into some compatibility issues. You may not have the same word processing programs that your students have. This can make reading their work a bit tricky.

There is one way around this that should be universal, the RTF file. In most word processing programs, you can choose to save your document as an RTF file. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Click File > Save As.


2. Find the drop-down list that shows the file type.


3. Change the file type to Rich Text Format (.rtf).


4. Click Save.

Once a file is saved as an RTF document, you should be able to open it using any word processing program.

Thanks for the tip, Sharon!