Dr. Bryan R. Drost, Firelands Local Schools, OFLA Technology Integration Chair

On behalf of the Tech Team, I am happy to welcome you to the 2015-2016 school year. We are hoping that you will find our work helpful to you this year as you are establishing clear expectations for student proficiency and finding ways to have your students demonstrate their proficiency.

This year we plan to address five things:

(1) We are committed to providing you with quick tech tips to help support you on a day-to-day basis. Please follow us at OFLATech on Twitter to learn more.

(2) We will be creating tech-based lessons and activities aligned with the modes of communication to help support teachers working on proficiency-based instruction.

(3) We plan to restructure our professional learning opportunities in a differentiated manner.  Our hope is to have several novice workshops that focus on the “how-to’s” of technology, intermediate workshops that focus on utilizing technology to assess proficiency and advanced workshops that focus on specific activities and lessons based on the modes of communication.  We plan on offering several webinars on various topics as well.  Please check out the OFLA Memberlodge to register for our various offerings at http://ofla.memberlodge.org.

(4) We will be investigating and selecting a new listserv platform to help meet the needs of our growing subscriber list.

(5) We will be exploring with the Editor for Electronic Media a way to integrate all of the various member tools we have to create a one-stop OFLA shop.

In addition to these goals, the Tech team will continue to moderate the OFLA Listserv to make sure that all posts follow our listserv guidelines. As a reminder, your OFLA Listserv subscription is separate from your OFLA Membership.  To change your settings and to review post guidelines please check out http://tinyurl.com/ofla-listserv.

We are hard at work meeting goal #2. Hopefully, you have seen several of our postings on the OFLA listserv. Additional examples aligned to different themes, languages, and levels will be forthcoming.  Check out the livebinder at http://tinyurl.com/oflalessons.

Lastly, a huge thank you to everyone who attended the Central States Extension workshops on technology integration through proficiency during the summer.   I know that all of our presenters had a great time sharing the various tools we use in our classrooms to help promote student acquisition of language.