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MACUL News

Collaborative Tools for Learning Conference Registration Launched

Posted Monday, November 17 by Ric Wiltse

Registration is now open for the 2nd Annual Collaborative Tools for Learning Conference, to be held at Ottawa ISD north of Holland (MI) on Monday, December 8.

For more information, link to

http://webtools4learning.org/page1/index.html

Free Technology Integration Training

Posted Monday, November 17 by Ric Wiltse
The Michigan Department of Education is now a State Education Partner with Thinkfinity, which is sponsored by the Verizon Foundation. If you haven't heard of Thinkfinity, it is the new and improved Marco Polo sponsored by the Verizon Foundation. Through our partnership with Thinkfinity we will be offering FREE TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATION TRAINING for teachers.

MDE is currently looking for people interested in becoming field trainers, so that they can start doing technology integration training for teachers in the winter/spring. The MDE is also currently taking the online Field Trainer Training, and so far it is really good. Please see this information: Online Field Trainer Training (TRN-O) and the Thinkfinity Online Course Policy . The next training starts in January and the registration deadline is December 1st. After the January class, the next Online Field Trainer Training is in March with a Feb 1st registration deadline. If you want to participate in the January course, please e-mail Karen Hairston at hairstonk@michigan.gov with your name, title, school/organization name, city, state, zip, and e-mail address that you want to use for the training BY NOV 26th, so that I can get you on the roster. Feel free to distribute the info to others.

Related to this training, MDE has partnered with the Michigan e-Library and Wayne State University to develop a portal for K-12 teachers. It is called MORE--Michigan Online Resources for Educators and is located here .

What makes this portal unique is that all of the resources are ALIGNED TO OUR MICHIGAN CONTENT EXPECTATIONS (K-12). Currently we have a couple of thousand math and science resources in the site, we are working on adding resources for the other core areas. We anticipate having approximately 8,000 resources in the portal within a month. This first set of resources is from the Michigan Teacher Network, and the resources were manually aligned by Michigan teachers in the Summer of 2006. Once these are in we will be aligning and adding more than 55,000 resources available through our partnership with Thinkfinity.

Thank you in advance for all of your help! Contact Karen if you have any questions.