eTech Ohio Connections
Volume 2, Issue 5

• Visit the New eTech Ohio Website: eTech Ohio is proud to announce the launch of its redesigned website. The goal of this redesign is to provide visitors with access to detailed information about eTech Ohio and to make it easy for visitors to access the content they want and need.
  
  New website features include:
  
  • Content that is aligned by service area for ease of use
  • Robust search engine that will make exploring our site almost effortless
  • More graphics and less text - makes it easy to find the information you want and need - immediately
    
    
  Many of the eTech Ohio offerings remain on the site, although behind a new and improved interface. For example, eTech Ohio has maintained the Hall Pass suite, including Opportunity Tracking Tool - our online registration/application system that handles class registrations, grant applications and more. There's a quick log in area on the home page, in the upper right hand corner, so you can easily find the information that you need.
  
  Customer feedback was the catalyst for change, and we welcome your continued feedback as our website continues to evolve.
  
  Visit the eTech Ohio website for the latest eTech Ohio news and information. For additional information or technical feedback, please call 877.383.2406.

• eTech Ohio presents the ninth annual Educational Technology Conference, Ohio Connects! Technology for Learning February 12, 13 and 14, 2007, at the Greater Columbus Convention Center. Registration will be available later this month through the Conference website.
  
  Note that Conference registration rates remain unchanged for Conference 2007. School districts may use their Professional Development (PD) Grant funds to offset Conference costs. Details and further information is available at the eTech Ohio website.
  
  
• Call for Proposals: Interested in sharing new ideas or successful practices for improving learning through the use of technology? Consider presenting at Conference 2007. Presenters receive complimentary full-Conference registration and lunch for all three days of the Conference. The Call for Proposals for Conference 2007 will be available later this month through the Conference website.
  
  
• Call for Volunteers: The Educational Technology Conference would not be such a great success without the help and support of its volunteers. Volunteers receive complimentary full-Conference registration and lunch for all three days of the Conference in exchange for working up to eight hours during the Conference. A limited number of volunteers will be accepted based on a first come, first served basis, so be sure to volunteer soon! The Call for Volunteers application form will be available later this month through the Conference website.
  
  
• 2007 Exhibition Space: Is your company or organization interested in exhibiting during Conference 2007? Join the hundreds of other private companies and public entities who exhibit during the three days of the Conference. 49% of Conference attendees report spending three or more hours in the Exhibit Hall while at the Conference. It's an excellent opportunity to connect with current customers/clients while also discovering new ones. Contact us for information about available booth space and rates for Conference 2007.
  
  
• Video- and Audio-on-Demand from Conference 2006 Sessions Still Available: Selected 2006 keynote, featured speaker and concurrent sessions are available as video- and audio-on-demand through the Conference website. Note that you will need Real Player in order to view videos and an MP3 player such as Microsoft Windows Media Player or QuickTime to listen to audio clips. Additional video and audio clips will be added to the Conference website in the coming weeks.
  
  
• Check Back Soon! The Call for Nominations for Educator Awards, Call for Submissions for Student Video Contest and Call for Submissions for Conference Documentary Team will be available soon. Look for additional opportunities and new Conference offerings to be posted on the Conference website in the coming months.
  
  Additional questions or inquiries about the eTech Ohio Educational Technology Conference should be directed to the Conference Team at 1.877.383.2406.

• In an on-going effort to align as many programs as possible to eTech Ohio's fiscal year funding cycle, there have been some changes in the conclusion area of entities' PD Grant Fund application as it relates to deadline dates. eTech realizes that this change in reporting requirements will cause concerns for some entities during this summer of changeover and is prepared to assist you with any transitional issues that your entity may have pertaining to the conclusion of FY06 and getting prepared for Professional Development Grant funding for FY07.
  
  Key Dates and Deadlines:
  
  
  • Monday, May 8, 2006 - Final Project Report and Final Expenditure Report will be available on your Professional Development Application in the Conclusion Area.
    
  • May 2006 - 2007 State Technology Conference registration opens. This will allow entities an excellent opportunity to effectively spend their FY06 funding prior to the spending deadline.
    
  • Friday, June 30, 2006 - Spending deadline for FY06 Professional Development Grant Funds.
    
  • Thursday, August 31, 2006 - Final Project Report (Impact & Financial) deadline. This is an online submission and the Financial area's completion populates directly to the Final Expenditure Report.
    
  • Tuesday, September 12, 2006 - Final Expenditure Report deadline.
    
    
  For detailed information on permissible and prohibited uses of PD Grant funds, please see the FY06 Spending Guidelines. For assistance in planning your FY06 technology professional development, please contact project coordinator Steve Crumbacher or eTech Ohio Customer Service with any questions or concerns.

• Registration is now open for the 2006 Ohio Technology Summer Summit through your eTech Ohio Hall Pass account. eTech Ohio, in partnership with the Management Council of the Ohio Education Computer Network (MCOECN), will host the fourth annual Ohio Technology Summer Summit Tuesday, June 27 and Wednesday, June 28, 2006, at the Quest Business Center in Columbus.
  
  The purpose of the eTech Ohio Summer Summit is to foster a K-12 community of learners that includes technology coordinators and other technical staff by providing opportunities to identify and access training and technical resources that support planning, provisioning, launching and managing of technology and support services that align with their districts goal of providing excellence in teaching and learning through the integration of technology.
  
  The eTech Ohio Summer Summit is held from 8:00 am - 4:30 pm over two days and includes approximately 40 tutorials (90 minutes each) and 10 workshops (six hours each). Workshops and tutorials are taught by many of your colleagues and practicing professionals from across the state who will demonstrate successful approaches or lessons learned, tell a story of overcoming challenges, provide hands-on examples about techniques or tools and provide participants the opportunity to network with other colleagues. The cost to attend the Summit and attend any number of classes is $50.00. Visit the Summer Summit home page for registration details. For additional information, contact educational technology consultant Sandra Paxton at 877.383.2406.

• eTech Ohio and ODE to offer online professional development courses: This fall, eTech Ohio and ODE will offer online professional development courses for all Ohio educators.
  
  Courses in OMAP (Ohio Mathematics Academy Project), OSCI (Ohio Science Institute) and SSIO (Social Studies Institute of Ohio) will be offered, along with many other courses. To view a complete list along with course information, registration, and graduate credit please visit the course catalog.
  
  Registration for the fall session will open on May 15, 2006, and the fall session will begin on Sunday, September 24, 2006.
  
  If you have any questions please contact the eLearning team.

• Print-out Links of Technology Plans Now Available: As of educational technology plan completion draws near, eTech Ohio realizes that a quality and easily read document articulating the direction of technology implementation is crucial to communicating with staff, students, parents, stakeholders and the community- at-large.
  
  In an effort to provide a document that can be easily shared with your internal staff and committee, eTech Ohio will be providing a PDF version of your technology plan in addition to the current HTML links in the TPT v.3.0 on the "Plan Home Status page" of your organization's technology plan. The links will provide a document for each phase in conjunction with a "View all" option to retrieve the entire document. The following features of the document will be available:
  
  
  • Special titling of the cover page to reflect either phase or entire document printing
  • Table of Contents (with associated bookmarks to the document)
  • Appendix A - a list of the documents added to the educational technology plan
    
    
  This print view of your technology plan is being provided for internal use only. It is solely the decision of the organization to share the document publicly. As a second rollout of the PDF document view, a public view of your technology plan will be made available after Friday, June 30, 2006.
  
  Forthcoming communications will provide greater detail on the structure and format of those PDF print views. For further inquiries on the print view document please contact Scott Kane at 877.383.2406.

• Through Wave 44 of the 2005-2006 funding year, Ohio applicants have received $60.5M in E-Rate discount awards. Total funding to date for Ohio is over $518M. Funding waves are still being announced by the Schools and Libraries Division (SLD) program administrators every week. Internal Connections funding awards have been lowered to the 88% level. USAC's Schools and Libraries Committee has requested that the FCC approve the lowering of the Priority 2 discount award level to 81%. Hopefully the discount percentage level for Priority 2 will be lowered soon.
  
  Program Integrity Assurance (PIA) is hard at work reviewing Funding Year 2006-07 applications. SLD expects to begin releasing Funding Commitment Decision Letters for 2006-07 very soon, as a substantial amount of applications have completed the review process and are ready for applicant notification.
  
  eTech Ohio provides comprehensive E-Rate program support including technology planning, annual workshops, listserv news and information, and individual problem resolution. We look forward to providing personalized E-Rate support throughout the upcoming Funding Year!
  
  For more information or with any questions on the federal E-Rate program, contact Dan Farslow at 877.383.2406.

• Over 200 schools submitted applications for the Action Research and Emerging Technology Competitive Professional Development grant. Teachers, principals, curriculum directors, technology coordinators and integrations worked together to determine the academic needs of the school or specific classrooms and to propose an emerging technology and instructional strategies that they though might help address the identified need(s).
  
  Much planning, research and energy went into these proposals. Unfortunately, eTech was able to fund only 20 grants although many shared thoughtful and innovative ideas with great potential. eTech Ohio wishes to commend the teachers on their outstanding efforts.
  
  Visit the Competitive Professional Development grant home page for a list of grant awardees.

• 2006-07 EETT New Eligible Grant Training and Reading Session: eTech Ohio and Ohio Department of Education will conduct readings for 2006-07 New EETT eligible buildings who submitted a Letter of Intent. These grant readings consist of a one-day training and one-day of grant reading and scoring. This training will be held Wednesday, May 17, 2006, and the grant readings and scoring will occur on Thursday, May 18, 2006. All grant applicants must send a grant reader and all grant readers must attend the one-day training session.
  
  Visit the EETT home page or contact educational technology consultant Chris Bode or coordinator Verda McCoy at 1.877.383.2406 for more information.

• On March 17, 2006, CET unveiled its reinvented and redesigned website CETconnect. Developed using input from surveys and focus groups, CETconnect gives CET yet another platform to provide high quality productions and timely information to its viewers. And now, these services are available worldwide.
  
  Presented as the first community-based on demand website, CETconnect provides streaming video of more than 50 hours of local lectures, documentaries, educational videos, CETconnect productions. New content is added daily to the website, which will add downloadable video, or podcasts, and possibly even RSS feeds in the future.
  
  In addition to on demand video, CETconnect also provides help for educators with several portions of its site dedicated to helping the over half-a-million teachers and students that CET serves in Greater Cincinnati. With links to professional development tools, workshops, searchable catalogs, and classroom projects, the Teachers & Students section provides valuable tools in an easy-to-get-to fashion.
  
  With CETconnect, CET continues its mission to be a leading provider of education and enrichment in classrooms, positively impacting the standard of living not only in Greater Cincinnati but now the world.
  
  Visit the new website today and be sure to share your thoughts via a brief survey.
  
  
• Ohio University, the WOUB Center for Public Media, and Educational Technology for Southeastern Ohio (eTSEO) have announced that the organizations have formed a partnership to provide a dynamic new instructional technology service that will be free to K-12 schools in an 18-county region of southeastern Ohio.
  
  Effective next school year, funding from eTech Ohio will be used to replace the K-12 ITV broadcast service from WOUB and eTSEO with a free Internet-based K-12 multimedia-on-demand service known as PowerMediaPlus.com. The partners will use an eTech Ohio basic operating subsidy grant to provide free PowerMediaPlus.com subscriptions for the 120,500 pupils in their service region.
  
  Implementation of the new free service will significantly increase the quality and quantity of multimedia content available to K-12 educators in our region without additional cost. The new multimedia curriculum resources will be aligned to the Ohio Academic Content Standards, and, most significantly, it will allow us to reach every classroom in our region via the Ohio K-12 and Third Frontier Networks.
  
  Elimination of the daily ITV broadcast schedule during the school year creates an opportunity for the WOUB Center for Public Media to serve new audience segments with digital programming services. The new K-12 service will provide Internet streaming multimedia-on-demand content from a server located at Ohio University. This server will be dedicated exclusively to a universe of users in the18-county service region. The Ohio University server will also provide multimedia instructional and professional development content created by the partners specifically for schools in their region.
  
  The WOUB Center for Public Media and eTSEO are in the process of implementing a series of regional seminars for school district representatives in May to introduce the features and benefits of the new service and begin the installation and access process. The partners will provide ongoing technical and educator professional development training designed to facilitate the broadest utilization of PowerMediaPlus.com as a means of helping school district improve student achievement.
  
  For more information contact eTSEO Executive Director Fred Charles Harner at 740.591.3871.
  
  
• On March 1, 2006, Trina Cutter, General Manager of PBS 43&45, accepted responsibility as President of the Ohio Educational Television Stations Association. She succeeded Tom Rieland, GM of WOSU in Columbus, who had served for two years. Cutter will be assisted by an executive committee comprised of Carolyn Lewis, WOUB, Athens; Marlon Kiser, WGTE, Toledo, and Tom Rieland.
  
  Ms. Cutter is a native of Canton, Ohio. After graduating from Canton Lincoln High School, she joined the United States Air Force. During her four years in the service, she received numerous leadership awards including Airman of the Month, Quarter and Year. She began higher education while still in the service and graduated in 1982 from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Telecommunications at Arizona State University. The early years of her television career involved behind-the-scenes documentary production and public affairs programming. Trina has been associated with numerous national productions on both PBS and the Discovery Channel and has won several national production awards and regional Emmys. She has worked at public television stations in Toledo, Ohio, Utah, Missouri and Indiana. In 2002, Trina was recognized by the St. Joseph County, Indiana, YWCA Tribute to Women in the Business and Professional category. In August 2002, she completed her Master's Degree in Not-for-Profit Management from the Mendoza College of Business at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana. During 2002, Trina received the Governor's highest civilian award for Community Service.
  
  Trina returned to her roots in northeastern Ohio in 2002 to serve as the President & General Manager of PBS 45 & 49, Akron, Youngstown stations. She also serves as chairperson of the national Small Station Association Board. As the chair of the Small Station Association Ms. Cutter is the SSA representative to the PBS Affinity Group Coalition (AGC). The AGC brings together representatives of all the public television affinity organizations, including state network coalitions, large market associations, university licensee organizations and others.
  
  Trina is a graduate of both Leadership Akron and Leadership Stark County. Active in her communities, Trina serves on the Leadership Stark County Citizenship Day Committee. She recently graduated from the Stark County Local Government Leadership Academy, a program designed for elected officials, potential candidates, local leaders and appointed individuals who serve on committees, commissions, task forces and boards. Among other things the Academy focused on community development and regional cooperation.
  
  Cutter is also on the Canton Forum Committee, the Greater Akron Musical Association Board and is a member of the Stark County Regional Planning Commission. She is active in the School of Leaders program at her church in Canton and is a member of the church choir.
  
  Under Trina's leadership WNEO-WEAO, PBS 45&49, has expanded its educational efforts, local production and community service involvement. The stations are serving their communities through their broadcasts, website, coverage of community meetings and forums, special events for children and adults, as well as the creation of education resources.
  
  
• Cleve Callison is the newly elected president of Ohio Public Radio (OPR). Callison has been General Manager of WMUB-FM (licensed to Miami University, Oxford) since 1997. WMUB has an eight-person, full-time staff, six part-time staff and several graduate and undergraduate students. Their format is NPR news & talk with jazz in the evenings. They have a weekly Cume of 44,900 about evenly split between the Cincinnati and Dayton markets -- primarily the northern suburbs in the Cincinnati area.
  
  Cleve's early background is in education. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in medieval English literature. Cleve taught for a few years and did a lot of volunteering for his local public radio station, which eventually offered him a job and a career change that has lasted. Callison was Program Director at WLRH in Huntsville, Alabama. Then, he helped start WSVH in Savannah, Georgia, as its first Program Director. From there Cleve became Station Manager of WFDD at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC for 14 years.
  
  At Miami , Cleve does all the usual GM stuff and occasionally dabbles in some on-air work. He's a fill-in host for Morning Edition and hosts a talk show once a week. He's been involved in OPR since coming to Ohio and is the Vice-President of PRIMA (Public Radio in Mid-America), the largest of public radio's regional organizations.
  
  The highlight of Callison's life, so far, was appearing on Jeopardy, June 16, 1994.
  
  
• WVIZ/PBS ideastream hosted the inaugural Smart and Sober Town Hall Meeting on March 28, 2006, in its broadcast studio at Idea Center. The Smart and Sober Town Hall Meetings are a public forum designed and sponsored by the Office of the First Lady of Ohio to promote public awareness about the dangers of and prevalence of underage drinking in Ohio. On April 6, the WVIZ/PBS news and information program, Ideas, aired excerpts of this meeting during a segment focused on the topic of adolescent alcohol abuse. The story of an Ohio teen girl who is a recovering alcoholic was told, and alcohol abuse prevention experts responded to a series of comments made by teens during the Town Hall Meeting.
  
  Recent broadcasts of the 90.3 WCPN daily arts and culture program AROUND NOON, hosted by Dee Perry, featured interviews with Broadway dancer Chita Rivera; Alexis Hefley, founder of Children of Uganda touring company, before their performance at Playhouse Square; and a panel of chefs from three local restaurants in the annual "Three Chefs" Easter/Passover call-in show.
  
  90.3 WCPN ideastream^sm launched on-demand audio podcasts of four local news and information programs: 90.3@9, the WCPN weekday morning news program; a daily 90.3 News podcast; Making Change feature stories, interviews and special programs; and the weekly Business Roundup. WCPN's homepage is also a central point of access to podcasts created by NPR, PRI and other content providers heard on WCPN.
  
  Recent episodes of the weekly WVIZ/PBS arts and culture program APPLAUSE featured interviews with Timothy Rub, the new director of the Cleveland Museum of Art; Dr. Henry Adams, author of Viktor Schreckengost and 20th Century Design; and Beth Ruthkowski, the new managing director of the Tri-C JazzFest.

The Ohio K-20 eLearning Symposium is open to all K-20 administrators, instructors, trainers and technical support staff. There is no registration fee and breakfast and lunch will be provided. You and your colleagues are encouraged to join us for discussions and presentations on how online learning is changing education in Ohio.

Tentative Agenda Overview:

• Breakfast and Registration (begins at 8:30 am)
• Welcome from Capital University & Blackboard (to begin promptly at 9 am)
• Keynote Address: Bills Sams, Chair of eTech Ohio and CIO of Ohio University
• 5 Minutes of Fame: Client Showcase
• Lunch
• Breakout Sessions (including an Executive Roundtable)
• Wrap Up (approximately 2:30 pm)

A finalized agenda and further details will follow shortly. We look forward to seeing you on May 18! If you have any questions or concerns about this event, please feel free to contact Siobhan Carroll or Shana Heikes.