I recently sent out the video below that hopefully explains our Delicious and Online Activities/Lessons grants. Teachers who have done the work are having fabulous success with it, so please check this out. If you have any questions about the grant, please email me.
Here is the link to the video:    http://www.screencast.com/t/ODVmNDAxMjE

This grant is not set in stone; you can modify it to your own needs. We want teachers to use technology that will help them reach their students, so think about how one of our grants would help you do that and then throw the idea by us.

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Teacher as Leader Program Updates

We’ve updated our Teacher as Leader program a bit. If you don’t know about the program, please read here. The original limit of $2500 per district has been removed. It’s first come first serve for those who would like to take advantage of the program. The Teacher as Leader program is an attempt to get more workshops into our schools with teachers as the leaders of the workshops. We hope that teachers will want to share their expertise with their colleagues. If you have any questions, please let me know. My contact information is on our About page.

TEACHER AS LEADER WORKSHOP PROGRAM

The purpose of this new grant will be to allow teachers in our two-county membership area to lead workshops after school, weekdays, or staff development days. They will develop the workshop, get it approved locally (and ultimately by the Teacher Center), and get reimbursed for their work from the Teacher Center. Because of the Teacher Center’s collaboration with BOCES, districts that use the BOCES coser 529-Effective Schools can be reimbursed for teacher stipends if they decide to compensate teachers for attendance at these workshops. The Teacher Center will not compensate attendees, only workshop presenters.

Workshops can be on any professional development topic deemed appropriate by the district level team. The Teacher Center will help to promote the workshop. This can encourage attendance from neighboring districts. It could also help to stimulate others to run similar workshops in their districts.

Specifics of the grant program:

• Teacher develops an idea for a locally based workshop and submits the idea to their local PD team or other appropriate district level people or teams.
• Policy Board members or representatives of the member are to introduce the program at faculty meeting(s) so that all teachers are aware of the program.
• District receives the workshop idea and submits it to the Teacher Center for final approval.
• The Teacher Center will review each grant proposal submitted by the district. The original deadline for applications has been eliminated.
• There is no longer a dollar limit in effect per district. First come first served for the grant money. The Teacher can decide about funding on a case by case basis.
• Teacher instructors will be paid $35 per workshop hour by the Teacher Center. Up to 2 hours of prep time at $35 per hour will be allowed for the first occurrence of the workshop. Other prep time pay will at the discretion of the district team.
• At least 90% of each grant will be used for trainer stipends with a 10% maximum allotment for materials.
• Districts that use the BOCES coser 529-Effective Schools can be reimbursed for teacher stipends if they decide to compensate teachers for attendance at these workshops. The Teacher Center will not compensate attendees, only workshop presenters. Attendee compensation is a local decision.

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Tutorials Posted Again

A couple of years ago, I posted some tutorials on our site. They were taken down when I switched to this new format. You can get them again by going to our Tech Links page.  I used Camtasia Studio to make them. I’ll soon be making some more videos about some grant opportunities.

A few teachers are currently working on grants using screen casting technology to make tutorials for their specific classes. For example, Jodi Brown from Fillmore is making some Photoshop tutorials about the parts of the program she wants her students to learn. I will post links to them once they are up and running. These videos provide a great way to show how to complete specific tasks or even provide detailed project instructions that can replayed over and over. You can even get a free account at www.screencast.com that allows you to store up to 2 gigabytes of files (that’s a lot o’ files). If you have any questions pertaining to screen casting and/or about grants for learning the programs and incorporating them into your teaching, let me know. My contact info is on the About page.

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Events a Big Success So Far

Our events have been a big success so far this year. We had over 60 people for Chick Moorman’s seminar on November 6 and over 50 for Dr. Mendler on Oct. 30. We’re almost up to our limit of 200 for Dr. Jean on December 4. Planning is in the works for other events that are based on your input, so keep those ideas coming. To see our calendar, please click on the Calendar of Events page on the right. For those workshops that have a corresponding survey, a link is there in case you’d like to review it.

We’re updating our site to a new WordPress blog. This blog has a cover section (blog entries) with pages that are linked on the right. The new site allows your fearless leader (me) to update the site from all sorts of exotic locations.  Comments are turned off for the pages, but if you have any comments or suggestions, please comment on any of these blog entries.  Our newsletters will now be a series of blog entries.

Last spring, we were little unsure if there would even be a Teacher Center program, but we were saved.  Our grant is at the same level as 2008-09, so there will be plenty of opportunities available for your professional development ideas.

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Some Great Events Shaping Up for This Year

Once again this year, we working on some very good events.  Our events are linked to the right on our Calendar of Events page.

We have two nationally known speakers and authors booked so far, Allen Mendler and Chick Moorman. Both men are experts in the field of student behavior.  Dr. Mendler is a co-author of the critically acclaimed Discipline with Dignity. His seminar will be on that very topic. Chick Moorman’s seminar will be titled Motivating the Unmotivated.  Mr. Moorman will also be giving a presentation to parents at JCC-Olean on November 5. We’re happy to have these excellent speakers in our area, and we’re hopeful to have a good turnout.  Please click on our Calendar of Events page for more info.

Once again, the good folks at BOCES will be a cosponsor for these events. This means that your district can use its sub coser.

Remember that many of our events have come from suggestions from teachers, so if you have an idea for something, let me know.  If you have any questions about our tried and true mini grants, study groups, or conference grants, please contact me here – catcdirector@yahoo.com.

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New Teacher as Leader Grants Available

New for this year, we’ve created a new grant called the Teacher as Leader program. This grant is an attempt to get more workshops in our wide geographic area. Here’s how it works:

The purpose of this new grant will be to allow teachers in our two-county membership area to lead workshops after school, weekdays, or staff development days. They will develop the workshop, get it approved locally (and ultimately by the Teacher Center), and get reimbursed for their work from the Teacher Center. Because of the Teacher Center’s collaboration with BOCES, districts that use the BOCES coser 529-Effective Schools will be reimbursed for teacher stipends for time that is beyond teacher contracts.

Workshops can be on any professional development topic deemed appropriate by the district level team. The Teacher Center will help to promote the workshop. This can encourage attendance from neighboring districts. It could also help to stimulate others to run similar workshops in their districts.  For the grant application, check our Grant Apps page.

Specifics of the grant program:

• Teacher develops an idea for a locally based workshop and submits the idea to their local PD team or other appropriate district level people or teams.
• Policy Board members or representatives of the member are to introduce the program at faculty meeting(s) so that all teachers are aware of the program.
• District gathers the workshop ideas and submits them to the Teacher Center for final approval.
• The Teacher Center will review each grant proposal submitted by the district. Deadline for 2009-10 applications is October 15, 2009.
• The total initial grant award for each district is $2,500. If a district does not apply for $2500 in total Teacher as Leader grants by the deadline date, all applications over a district’s limit will be evaluated and allowed at the discretion of the Teacher Center.
• Teacher instructors will be paid $35 per workshop hour by the Teacher Center. Up to 2 hours of prep time at $35 per hour will be allowed for the first occurrence of the workshop. Other prep time pay will at the discretion of the district team.
• At least 90% of each grant will be used for trainer stipends with a 10% maximum allotment for materials.
• Note: The teacher Center will not pay workshop attendees; that is a local matter.  Districts that use the BOCES coser 529-Effective Schools are eligible to be reimbursed for teacher stipends for time that is beyond teacher contracts. This arrangement will be specific to your district’s policy for training hours above and beyond contract hours.

If you have any questions, please talk to your Policy Board member or email me directly. If you’re not sure of who is the Policy Board member for your district, click on the Members and Policy Board page.

I hope you like the new format and thanks for taking a look!

Tim Houseknecht, Teacher Center Director and Fearless Leader

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It’s been another successful year at the good ‘ol Teacher Center.  We’ve run some very successful events with the help of BOCES, St. Bonaventure, and the teachers who suggested the events. I’d like to especially thank Jenn Larson from Cuba with her suggestions for speech pathology workshops. The speech people of the area have been very grateful for the events that we were able to bring down here. I’d like to continue to help them and to help other groups, so if you would like to see workshops designed for a particular group, please let me know.

Here are some workshop surveys for 08-09:

John DeMado LOTE workshop, Oct. 16
Susan Cochrane – Speech pathology – Oct. 17
Soaring Stories, Oct. 24
Delicious/Thinkfinity training w/Tim Houseknecht
Speech workshop, March 20
John DeMado #2 LOTE workshop, March 31

Great New Grant Opportunity for 2009-10:
Teacher As Leader Workshops

Our board just approved a new grant idea for 2009-10 called the Teacher as Leader program. We’ve been trying to think of ways to decentralize our workshops and offer more things based on the wide geographic area we serve, and we think we’ve found a reasonable way to address this. We want to allow teachers to have the opportunity to share their knowledge with their colleagues from their district or any neighboring districts.

This grant program is another collaborative effort with BOCES because your district can take advantage of coser 529 – Effective Schools for reimbursement of any stipend you may get to attend an after school workshop. Teacher stipends are of course a local decision, but our good friends at BOCES have OK’d this for this grant. The result is that the workshop presenter will be paid through the Teacher Center grant and attendees will be paid or otherwise given local inservice credit based on their district’s policy.

Workshops can be on any professional development topic deemed appropriate by the district level team. The Teacher Center will help to promote the workshop. This can encourage attendance from neighboring districts. It could also help to stimulate others to run similar workshops in their districts.

Why this type of grant?

The purpose of this new grant will be to allow teachers in our two-county membership area to lead workshops after school, weekdays, or staff development days. They will develop the workshop, get it approved locally (and ultimately by the Teacher Center), and get reimbursed for their work from the Teacher Center.

Workshops can be on any professional development topic deemed appropriate by the district level team. The Teacher Center will help to promote the workshop. This can encourage attendance from neighboring districts. It could also help to stimulate others to run similar workshops in their districts.

Specifics of the grant program:

• Teacher develops an idea for a locally based workshop and submits the idea to their local PD team or other appropriate district level people or teams.
• District gathers the workshop ideas and submits them to the Teacher Center for final approval.
• Teacher Center reviews the grant proposals submitted by the district. Deadline for 2009-10 applications: September 30, 2009
• Total grant award for each district of $2,500. If a district does not apply for $2500 in total Teacher as Leader grants by September 30, the remaining money can be used for other districts to increase their level.  Note: The TC reserves the right to extend the deadline if needed because of time constraints.
• Teacher instructors will be paid $35 per workshop hour by the Teacher Center. Up to 2 hours of prep time at $35 per hour will be allowed for the first occurrence of the workshop. Other prep time pay will at the discretion of the district team.
• Workshop material costs (books, DVD’s, misc. materials) can be included as part of the total $2500 package.
• Districts that allow payments for workshop attendance and that use the BOCES coser 529-Effective Schools will be reimbursed for teacher stipends for time that is beyond teacher contracts. Check with your district on this point.

If you are interested, please download the form here:
SCHOOL-NAME-teacher as leader app
If I’ve missed anything, please let me know and I’ll make changes. This form will also be available on our Downloads page with our other grant forms.

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Interactive Whiteboard Camp at Cuba Rushford

The Program
This camp offers interaction with teachers on both basic and advanced uses of Promethean equipment and software. There will be a “100 level” group in the MSHS computer lab and a “200 level” group in the MSHS Library Computer Area. The 100 level will be appropriate for new users.  The 200 level will be appropriate for teachers that have experience with a board.

Teachers will experience “hands-on” learning.  The day will have instructional session(s) with work out time to build your own flipcharts. See Interactive White Board User Camp Schedule on back or below for details.  You may choose to work and learn on your own, or in small groups at camp.

Sessions will be facilitated by teachers that will be available as we all create flip charts for our 2009-2010 school year during our work out time.

Schedule
Camp will be held Aug. 10^th through Aug 13^th starting at 8:30 AM ending at noon daily.  The location will be the Cuba-Rushford Middle High School.  Attendees need to provide their own transportation.

Coordinator
Jay Morris, CRCS Technology Integration Specialist. Any questions about class content and/or instruction may be directed to him at 585-808-3603 or via email at jmorris@crcs.wnyric.org For a information poster, click here.

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Delicious and Thinkfinity Grants A Big Success

This year, we awarded 16 minigrants where people used Delicious online bookmarks with other online tools such as Thinkfinity (www.thinkfinity.org). The people who are using Delicious absolutely love it for keeping track of sites because it allows them to access their bookmarks from anywhere. They can share their bookmark sites with their students and edit them from home.  If you’d like to see what the fuss is all about, please contact me.
Click here for a survey about Delicious.
Click on the Delicious/Thinkfinity grant form here: Delicious/Thinkfinity grant

Our grant forms are all available on our downloads page, and you can start applying now for 2009-10. To access the grant form, please click here.  If you have an idea for quality professional development, it probably fits within our rules, so go for it!

Once again, thanks for a successful year. Remember that the Teacher Center grant is only succcessful with input from you, our valuable teachers. Thanks for having faith in me to run this program for you.

Tim Houseknecht, Director

I’ve been experimenting with several blogs for our newsletter, so I’m sorry for any confusion as to the web address. I’ve settled on using a WordPress blog since there is no cost, it’s easy to use, and it looks good.

To access the newsletter posts that I put in Edublogs a few months back, please click here:  http://cateach.edublogs.org

We have just a little money left for 2008-09. We’ll probably use the majority of it for some tech purchases, but if you have a project that just can’t wait until 09-10, please let me know.

The Teacher Center program was fully funded with federal stimulus money for next year. We all hope that funding will continue into the future. We’re also thankful to NYSUT and the legislators that supported the program.

NY Teacher Centers: Summer Online Academy Courses

Here are the Summer 2009 Online Academy courses. Please add them to your websites so your teachers might take advantage of the courses.   Click here for the OLA Summer flyer.

Marianne Smith, Assistant DirectorRockland Teachers’ Center845 942-760465 Chapel StreetGarnerville, NY 10923www.rockteach.org
msmith@rockteach.lhric.org