OME-RESA NEWSLETTER

Ohio Mid-Eastern Regional Education Service Agency

An Information Technology Center (ITC) of the Ohio Education Computer Network (OECN)

Serving an 11 county area and 45 school districts in Mid-Eastern Ohio

OME-RESA Insight

Student Services Update 5

EMIS Update 6

Fiscal Update 7 - 9

INFOhio Update 10 - 16

Network/System Update 17 - 18

Administrative Update 2 - 3

Co-op Services Update 4

Inside this issue:

OME-RESA PHONE EXTENSIONS

ANGIE UNDERWOOD 116

ADAM TRUEX 120

BERNIE GRABITS 106

BRENDA HARTLEY 103

CINDY ALBAN 150

CINDY BONI 115

DAVE SAVASTONE 102

DIANE MCAFEE 126

JEFF KRZYS 128

JODI FOGLE 108

KATHY DUNLEVY 122

MERRE GAE WINE 175

MICHELLE MILLIKEN 107

MISSY SUTHERLAND 104

MISSY VALKOSKY 125

SAM FLEDER 110

SANDY PETROZZI 109

VALERIE KEOUGH 105

WIB UNKLESBAY 154

Issue 11

Fall 2012

This fiscal year, OME-RESA welcomed two additions to the OME-RESA team. Missy Valkosky, hired August 1, 2012, is working in the Fiscal Services Department and Jodi Fogle, hired October 1, 2012, is working in Administrative Services. Both Missy and Jodi will be working out of the Steubenville office and are great additions to the team. If you see either Missy or Jodi at an OME-RESA event, please make sure they have the opportunity to meet you. All of the OME-RESA team would like to take a minute to thank all the participating districts and their staff for the support you have provided over the years. Without your participation and leadership in OME-RESA services, OME-RESA would not be one of the leading service providers that we are today! As always, we are here to assist districts in meeting their goals. Please contact us with any questions or concerns you may have.

Welcome Missy and Jodi!

By Angela Underwood, Executive Director

P A G E 2 O M E - R E S A I N S I G H T

ADMINISTRATIVE UPDATE Attendance Calls Available Through PreK12 Notification System

Districts that use OME-RESA’s PreK12 Notification System for their call system have the option to make their daily absence calls using the system. The system is tied into DASL and can pull all students into a list that are absent for the day in the district. Here is how the process works: 1. Create a list called “Attendance” or “Absence” in your school building/s. The list type needs to be “Click to

Call”.

The first time you want to use the list: a. Open the attendance list through the Manage Lists tab. b. Hit the Populate List Key. This will bring in all students that were entered that day as absent through DASL. You’ll want to do this no sooner than a half hour or so AFTER your district has finished entering attendance through DASL. Once you hit the populate list key . . . the students will be added as list members. c. After the list is there, review it and remove anyone that doesn’t need to get an attendance call (i.e. tardies, excused absences). d. Call the 800# and select the attendance list as the one you want to send a message to. Record your message being careful to make it be what it should be each day (i.e. use words like “today” rather than a specific date like October 10th). Finish the message as you usually would for attendance calls and send it out. Using the list each day after the first time: a. Open the attendance list through the Manage Lists tab. b. Hit the Populate List Key and review students it brings in . . . delete any you do not want to have called. c. Go back to the Manage Lists tab and choose the attendance list. Click on the “Click to Call” button. The call will go out to the students on the list using the message you recorded in “d” above. If you have a two hour delay . . . it is done in the same manner . . . just a little later in the day. You can run a report on this from the Reports tab. The report will list who was called and the status of that call (i.e. answered, voicemail). Great documentation. As always, should you have any questions regarding this or anything relating to the PreK12 Notification System . . . email prek12_staff@omeresa.net.

P A G E 3 I S S U E 1 1

ADMINISTRATIVE UPDATE - CONTINUED

eTech Ohio Offers Internet Safety Training

eTech Ohio is pleased to extend Learning.com's EasyTech Online Safety training to all Ohio school districts. This tool is an easy-to-implement, web-delivered district-wide solution that also docu-ments E-Rate compliance with reports on student performance.

EasyTech Online Safety employs a positive - not fear-based - curriculum, based on current re-search. It also includes resources for teachers and parents, and supports users with engaging and effective interactive lessons, resources and guides. This tool is available at no cost to all of Ohio's chartered non-public and public school districts as defined by the Ohio Department of Education through eTech Ohio.

For more information on E-Rate requirements and documentation, please contact Lorrie Germann at 614-485-6050. Lorrie’s email address is lorie.germann@etech.ohio.gov

P A G E 4 O M E - R E S A I N S I G H T

CO-OPERATIVE SERVICES UPDATE “Evolving To Better Service Its Members”

Bus Bids Coming Out Soon

OME-RESA along with the EPC (Southwestern Educational Purchasing Con-sortium) is currently out to bid for busses. Co-op members were surveyed and a sur-prising number of purchases are planned for this year. Between the two co-ops, the bid is for 149 busses. Cardinal, International and Thomas will be submitting bids. Each make and size will have a base model price and several hundred options, at bid pricing, to choose from. Trade-ins will be accepted. If you submit your bus information and are not happy with the trade-in price, you are not required to trade it in. Bid pricing will be posted on the OME-RESA website the week of November 5 and will remain in effect thru mid-February. Districts that need a bus after the expira-tion of the bid pricing can contact the vendor to extend pric-ing. This year busses were purchased off bid as late as June 30.

Electricity Program

OME-RESA began its electric pro-gram in 2011 with 27 OME-RESA members. Following the original RFP, AEP Energy (formerly known as AEP Retail) was awarded the contract thru December, 2013. OME-RESA, in collaboration with the same co-ops and districts that bid natural gas, is

researching opportunities to further reduce electric costs. More information and an opportunity to enroll will become available in November. Districts that currently participate and have buildings to add, can do so as well as districts who are not currently participating. AEP Ohio, First Energy and Ohio Edison customers can participate in the OME-RESA Electric Program. The current contract is .05582 a Kwh. Districts not currently under contract should not sign a con-tract until reviewing the proposal the consortiums will have to offer. It will be VERY competitive.

Natural Gas Program July 1 started a new contract with Con-stellation Energy. Program members are seeing a 35-40% reduction in their natural gas budgets. This reduction includes the fact that members are pay-ing both Energy USA for gas hedges made under contract as well as Constel-lation for services beginning July 1. As always, billing will be on an October-April cycle with Constellation per-forming true-ups during the summer months after they receive final usage numbers from Columbia Gas. W-9’s for Constellation will be emailed next week if not sooner. This program is available to buildings using over 6,000 mcf annually. Many districts in the program since its in-ception have smaller buildings using as little as 2,000 mcf annually were grandfathered by the PUCO to be able to participate in the GTS program offered by Columbia Gas. OME-RESA along with other co-ops like MEC, EPC, and Stark County COG, along with Columbus Public Schools and Southwestern City Schools make up the 245 members in the Ohio Schools Consortium Gas Program. Last year, the budget for all 245 entities was $4.5 million monthly. The consortium uses 4 billion cubic feet of natural gas annually.

Cafeteria Food This year OME-RESA collaborated with EPC to bid cafeteria food, small wares, paper and plastics, and bread. OME-RESA’s annual bid sales were $3.3 million for the 2011-12 school year. EPC’s bid sales were $17.5 mil-

lion. The bids were combined to drive pricing. Gordon Food Service and Sysco are the two primary vendors that will be servicing districts this year. OME-RESA will be giving food co-op members a ½% rebate on sales at the end of the year for the first time since the food co-op be-gan in 1997. If you would like to serve on the OME-RESA Food Committee, please contact Michelle at OME-

Coming Soon! Laptops, Towers, Netbooks, and Ipads (and their likeness) Bid Catalog coming late fall/early winter Transportation Supplies Bid coming this winter Liability, Fleet & Property Program – Informational Meetings will begin first quarter 2013 For more information contact: Michelle Milliken at michelle.milliken@omeresa.net or 740-283-2050 (107)

P A G E 5 I S S U E 1 1

STUDENT SERVICES UPDATE

StudentInformation Software Releases

13.1 - Installed 9/27/12 * New Special Services tab under Special Education

* Membemis Updates

* Report Enhancements

* Family Group Wizard

13.2 Single Sign On Release – mid-October 13.3 Transcript Enhancements New/Upcoming tutorials: DASL/EMIS Course Section Teacher History Record (“Wipe and New” procedure) DASL Family Group Wizard

ProgressBook/GradeBook We recently held trainings to show a PowerPoint presentation of what the New ParentAccess Web-site will look like. The new look will make it easier to navigate, and with the new "key" account ac-cess, allow parents to create their own parent and student accounts. We are going to install this for the 13/14 school year, and will hold trainings prior to, so you are familiar with using the program. We will also be holding additional Points of Contact Administrators and Train the Trainer trainings in January or February 2013.

Student Information Throughout the year we will be holding JVS Grade Export/Import trainings for our Career Centers/JVS's and their home schools. The "hands on" instruction will allow the districts to transfer their grades and/or attendance for themselves and give them a better understanding of the course history records.

P A G E 6 O M E - R E S A I N S I G H T

EMIS UPDATE  

The FY13K reporting period is scheduled to open on October 12th 2012. This reporting period will run through the end of January and close on January 25th 2013. Keep in mind that funding for Ohio schools is based on reporting accurate attendance data for students en-rolled the first week of October. Please check the ODE web site often for the most recent ODE Processing Schedule. This can be found by go-ing to the OME-RESA web site and clicking on Links and then on ODE. At the ODE web site click on Data, EMIS, EMIS Accountability to access this document. Two new EMIS webinars have been added to the OME-RESA web page. Click on Professional Develop-ment / StudentServicesWebinars. You will find the DASL/EMIS Gifted webinar that explains the steps re-quired to add gifted records for all students and update specific grade level screenings, and the EMIS Wipe and New Webinar which is a quick demonstration of this new required procedure for EMIS reporting this year.

 

 

P A G E 7 I S S U E 1 1

FISCAL SERVICES UPDATE

Affordable Health Care Act Impacting 2012 W2 reporting

Fiscal staff has still been working with districts who had not updated their health care records to include the mandatory board shares for 2012 payrolls, or who had inadvertently put a stop date on DEDSCN records when an insurance holiday/moratorium occurred. The reporting requirement, once again, it to place the VALUE of the employer shares onto the W2. When an insurance holiday/moratorium occurs, that simply means the premium due is being drawn from your insurance pool, which has restrictions on how much cash can be in it. You must still track the board’s share on the DEDSCN rec-ord. If you have a case where you have, or you will have, an insurance holiday/moratorium, please email fstaff before doing so in order for us to help you process it correctly. It is important to remember that this is an IRS regulation, not one imposed by a simple software change or an ODE or Ohio legislative act. There have been questions asked of me about the employee share, which is also stopped during the insurance holiday and ‘shouldn’t it be on the W2 to show the true value?” That is not a question I can answer; it is one with legal ramifications and one which no OME-RESA staff member is qualified to answer. I strongly suggest you con-tact your health care provider and ask them for input on that particular portion of the premium that was legitimately stopped since they are more educated on the subject than all of us. Hopefully, they won’t just point you to the IRS web-site for you to try to interpret it on your own. For the final time, I am providing the IRS link and text from the link that describes this portion of the IRS requirement due to the Health Care reform. http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=220809,00.html

P A G E 8

FISCAL SERVICES UPDATE - CONTINUED

O M E - R E S A I N S I G H T

Health care reform requires employers to calculate and report the aggregate cost of applicable employer-sponsored health insurance coverage on employees' Form W-2s. The new rule applies for employees' tax years beginning after December 31, 2010. **Reprieve to begin with 2012 payrolls/W2’s was granted to employers, but this was the original wording from the law** Plans for which coverage costs must be reported under the new requirement include:

Medical coverage (including health reimbursement arrangements)

Executive physical benefits

Prescription drug coverage

On-site clinics

Medicare supplemental policies

EAPs (except for referral only programs)

Health Care FSA – employer contributions only (e.g., “seed” or match) Dental and vision, unless stand-alone plans (i.e., employee may elect only dental or only vision and is not required to also enroll in medical coverage) The cost of coverage under health flexible spending accounts, health savings accounts, and specific disease or hospital/fixed indemnity plans is excluded from the reporting requirement.

The calendar year end fiscal inservice meetings are scheduled for December at the Buckeye JVS in New Philadelphia and Eastern Gateway Community College in Steubenville. All normal year end topics will be reviewed as well as any new topics. Please mark your calendars and plan to attend this important meeting. If you haven’t done so already, please register via the Event Scheduler on our home page. Once the dates are finalized we will email everyone and you will register via our Home Page, Fiscal Department, Event Calendar. Please be sure to register and attend this meeting.

Calendar Year End Meetings

P A G E 9

FISCAL SERVICES UPDATE - CONTINUED

I S S U E 1 1

FY 13 Five Year Forecast and Assumptions Beginning in FY12, treasurers began submitting their own five year forecast data and assumptions to ODE via the new Data Collector method. The process of creating the forecast was the same as in years past, and those files con-tinued to be uploaded to the Alpha for validation and combination into a single file, but the treasurer was notified that the file was error free and that they now needed to download the file to the data collector and upload/prepare/certify and submit themselves. Instructions for the entire process, including the data collector submission, were placed in the Knowledge Book area of our Helpdesk. I was very pleased to see that the submissions in the data col-lector went so smoothly. There were still the problems with the notes file we encounter every year, but the data col-lector went off without a hitch. Good job everyone! FY13 processes and procedures for the forecast remain the same and are underway, even before we have had a chance to finish reporting FY12 financial information. I know this is very confusing to you all; it’s just as confusing and overwhelming to us to not be able to answer your questions on ‘when will it open and when will it close?”. It’s been a very rough year for EMIS reporting to say the least, but we’re doing all we can on this end to prepare you for the submission and appreciate your patience as we all sit and wait.

Kiosk and IPDP Update We continue to bring on districts, attempting to train and roll out three districts in the fall and three in the spring. We also had two more districts, already on Kiosk, dive into the IPDP module this past August, so things are looking good in that area. If you are not already on the Kiosk and are interested, please email HRKIOSK@OMERESA.NET and we will be happy to field questions and/or put you on the list for training. In September, 2012, the James Group and AESOP finalized the integration between their two packages. For those who are not aware of what AESOP is, it’s an automated sub call out system. There have been requests over the years to have such a module in Kiosk, but with an already existing package working very well for about half the dis-tricts in Ohio, two of whom are in our own ITC, it was decided to integrate rather than reinvent the wheel. It’s being tested in 8 districts currently and we expect to have it available to the rest of us within the next month or so. Howev-er, that kind of bumps into the calendar year end time of year so I anticipate that our two districts will want to wait until after that crazy time of year is over before trying to integrate the two packages.

Discovery Portal for 2012/2013

INFOhio eBooks Page Updated for 2012/2013!

P A G E 1 0

INFOHIO UPDATE

O M E - R E S A I N S I G H T

New for 2012/2013! The toolkit contains bookmarks, flyers, and other items—like the HTML code for the widgets that you can download and use with your students and faculty.

It will be updated frequently as new items are developed – check back often!

As long as you’re sitting in a building that is authenticated for the databases, you will be able to download all the brochures that have the username and password printed on them without entering the password.

Great new look for the Discovery Portal for 2012/2013

Links to the Grade Level Pages Links to the Electronic Resources by

Grade Level and Core Collection Links to additional HELP resources

on how to incorporate the DP into your curriculum

Page now lists total number of eBooks and Audio books available!

Popular eBooks that have been down-

loaded Latest addition to the eBook collection How to get access to the INFOhio ebooks And much, much more!

P A G E 1 1

INFOHIO UPDATE - CONTINUED

Learn with INFOhio! Webinars for 2012/2013

Common Core Resources!

I S S U E 1 1

INFOhio has updated the webinar page for the 2012-13 school year. If you do not see “2012-13” when you go to www.infohio.org/webinars, please delete your cache. Previous webinars for the 2011/2012 school year are also archived if you need to view them! Additional materials are also linked to each webinar…and, you can receive CEU credit! NOTE: If you sign up for the INFOhio email newsletter, you will receive notification of upcoming webinars….. You can do this from the main infohio webpage (www.infohio.org).

Sample search for ‘Text Complexity’ reveals many sources of information for you to pass on to your staff!

Use the DP – Educator’s Guide

Website Updates- http://www.infohio.org/webinars

Scholastic News and the Common Core

P A G E 1 2 O M E - R E S A I N S I G H T

INFOHIO UPDATE - CONTINUED

Top 5 Ways Scholastic News meets the Common Core:

1. Engaging informational texts feature varying structures, including comparison, cause/effect, and sequencing.

2. Lesson plans address key standards, including asking and answering text-dependent questions.

3. Articles contain academic and domain-specific vocabulary for third grade.

4. Thought-provoking stories and online videos encourage students to take part in speaking and listening activities.

5. Articles are written across the grade 3 band of text complexity throughout the school year.

September 2012 edition (available from EBSCOHost) contains Objectives and Common Core Standards for different activities.

P A G E 1 3

INFOHIO UPDATE - CONTINUED

I S S U E 1 1

INFOhio KBC (Knowledge Building Community)

Common Core Thrusts Librarians Into Leadership Role

Inquiry, Complex Text, and the Common Core is just one of the great KBC groups available to you and your staff. Log on (or create a login) to the 21st Century Learning Commons Click on the Community (KBC) link at the top of the page You can then scroll down to the GROUPS-ALL GROUPS and see all the great groups already created:

Using the GO! INFOhio: Ask, Act, and Achieve site for research Inquiry, Complex Text, and the Common Core College and Career Readiness Digital Citizenship 21st Century Teaching Tools and many more!

Educators help teachers acquire inquiry-based skills integral to standards It's the second week of the school year, and middle school librarian Kristen Hearne is pulling outdated nonfiction books from the shelves. She is showing one teacher how to track down primary-source documents from the Vietnam War and helping a group of other teachers design a project that uses folk tales to draw students into cross-cultural comparisons. With the common standards on her doorstep, Ms. Hearne has a lot to do. Her library at Wren Middle School in Piedmont, S.C., is a nerve center in her school's work to arm both teach-ers and students for a focus on new kinds of study. She's working to build not only students' skills in writing, reading, research, and analysis, but also teachers' skills in teaching them. She and other librarians say they view the common core, with its emphasis on explanation, complex text, and cross-disciplinary synthesis, as an unprecedented opportunity for them to really strut their stuff. "When it comes to the common core, librarians can be a school's secret weapon," said Ms. Hearne, who blogs as "The Librarian in the Middle." Like most school librarians, Ms. Hearne has been trained both as a teacher and a librarian, a combination she thinks is per-fectly suited to helping students and teachers as the Common Core State Standards presses them into inquiry-based modes

of learning and teaching. She helps them find a range of reading materials in printed or online form and collaborates to develop challenging cross-disciplinary projects. And like colleagues around the country, Ms. Hearne also plays important instruction-al roles often unrecognized by the public: as co-instructor along-side classroom teachers, and as professional-development pro-vider for those teachers. "The common standards are the best opportunity we've had to take an instructional-leadership role in the schools and really to support every classroom teacher substantively," said Barbara Stripling, the president-elect of the American Library Associa-tion, and a professor of practice in library science at Syracuse University.

Media specialist Monique German provides research guidance to 6th graders at Powdersville Middle School in Powdersville, S.C. Already equipped with inquiry-based skills, librarians are helping teachers adapt their instructional techniques for the common standards. —Kendrick Brinson for Education Week

P A G E 1 4

INFOHIO UPDATE - CONTINUED

O M E - R E S A I N S I G H T

Ms. Stripling's work to implement the common core in the New York City schools illustrates the central role school librarians are playing as the standards move from ideas on a page to instruction in the classroom. Overseeing that district's 1,200 school librari-ans, Ms. Stripling and her staff analyzed the standards' expectations for inquiry and information-literacy, developed sample lessons and formative-assessment tools around key common-core skills, and shared those and other resources during four-day development sessions with the district's librarians.

Guiding Teachers Adopted by all but four states, the standards have prompted coordinating discussions among the library-association divisions that represent librarians in public schools, city libraries, and higher education, said Susan Ballard, the president of the American Asso-ciation of School Librarians, one of those divisions. All librarians are affected by the new expectations, she said: those who help at K-12 schools, at city libraries during the after-school and weekend hours, and those on college campuses, who have had to support students unequipped for college-level research and inquiry. "[The common standards] drove us to look at ourselves as an ecosystem, all working together," Ms. Ballard said. "Students have a false sense of security that they can find anything online, but that's mostly quick facts. They don't know how to ask good, re-searchable questions, assess information critically. So much of the core is based in inquiry, and that is what librarians do on a dai-ly basis. It speaks our language." A comparison of the AASL's own standards for learning with the new standards showed similar expectations for students' skills and "habits of mind," she said. As lead librarian for the New Hanover County schools in Wilmington, N.C., Jennifer LaGarde has been focusing intently on "beefing up" her role as an instructional support to teachers, she said. "The common core is so much about how we teach," said Ms. LaGarde, a national-board-certified librarian, winner of the ALA's 2011 "I Love My Librarian" award, and the author of the "Adventures of Library Girl" blog. "We've been looking at support mate-rials, but we're more focused on shifting to inquiry-based instruction. "Materials are almost secondary; it's really about helping teachers think about new ways to provide instruction and helping them see that there is someone in the building who already knows how to do that," said Ms. LaGarde, noting that North Carolina, like many states, requires librarians also to be certified teachers. As part of her district's common-core implementation team, Ms. LaGarde spends a lot of time providing staff development on the standards. As the teacher-librarian for Myrtle Grove Middle School, she attends teachers' planning and departmental meetings and works one-on-one with them to design projects and to scour new books, journals, and subscription databases for interesting and challenging reading material. In her school in South Carolina recently, Ms. Hearne guided one social studies teacher in preparing for a cross-disciplinary unit on the Vietnam War. In language arts classes, students read the novel Cracker!, about a bomb-sniffing dog and its handler during that war. The social studies teacher wanted primary-source materials to pair with the novel. Working with Ms. Hearne, she found pho-tographs of dog-handlers from that war, along with videos and transcripts of interviews with them. Ms. Hearne and the other two middle school librarians also recently trained science and social studies teachers, who are now ex-pected to teach their students literacy skills specific to those disciplines. That kind of staff-development work is especially im-portant in tight budget times, Ms. Hearne said. "There isn't a lot of money to bring people in from the outside, so we have filled those shoes for our district," she said. Even as they play that role, however, librarians themselves are drawing on a leaner set of resources because of cutbacks in recent years. Between the 2004-05 and 2010-11 school years, 32 states lost library positions, according to an analysis by Keith Curry Lance, a consultant with rsl Research Group in Louisville, Colo. Those losses averaged 161 positions, or 16 percent, per state, but went as high as 48 percent in Michigan.

P A G E 1 5

INFOHIO UPDATE - CONTINUED

I S S U E 1 1

Ms. LaGarde said she has had no dedicated library budget in Wilmington for four years and instead must resort to "begging the principal" for what she needs. The common core's emphasis on complex texts, and in particular on rich nonfiction, has given her "great ammunition" to expand her collection, as teachers demand new kinds of reading materials, she said. In some places, the common core appears to be driving restorations of those budget cuts. Ms. Hearne reports that although this is her third year without an assistant, her book budget has doubled this year. That came in the wake of her superintendent's request for a report on the percentage of fiction and nonfiction, and the age of the nonfiction materials, in the district's school libraries, she said.

Revamping Collections The common standards have prompted school librarians to "take a hard look" at their collections to weed out dated material and bolster challenging fiction and nonfiction resources, said the AASL's Ms. Ballard. In doing so, they are looking especially closely at the rigor of the readings they offer, since the standards emphasize assigning students "on-grade-level" texts, even if that means extra supports are needed to help them. Librarians are also looking to better balance their collections with high-quality nonfiction, she said, since the standards use such texts as content-builders and vehicles for the teaching of discipline-specific literacy skills. Paige Jaeger, who oversees 84 school libraries in the Saratoga Springs, N.Y., area, counted more than 700 "power verbs" in the standards, such as "analyze," "integrate," and "formulate," that press students toward more rigor and inquiry-based learning. That has implications both for a library's collection of resources and for the way teachers teach, said Ms. Jaeger, who conduct-ed a recent common-core training for the AASL and posted those resources on her blog. She is preaching a three-part gospel to her colleagues: rich text, raising rigor, and repackaging research. Ms. Jaeger helps teachers rework their curricula into research-driven activities that require students to put those power verbs into action. "If your assignment can be answered on Google, it's void of higher-level thought," she quipped. Case in point: the typical report on a country, which is often little more than an assemblage of facts. Ms. Jaeger and her col-leagues have reshaped it around a question. Students might be asked what it means to live in a globally interdependent world. They could be sent home with an assignment to examine the labels on their clothing and food and note their countries of origin. As a class, they can graph those nations and examine the emerging portrait of importers and exporters. Each student could dive into his or her country's place in that system and write about the perils and promises of that role. Then, imagining themselves as ambassadors at the United Nations, they would have to figure out what issues are most pressing for their country and how best to plead for funding. That kind of repackaging, Ms. Jaeger said, necessitates bolstering the rigor and richness of materials students use across the disciplines. Even as leisure reading at all levels of difficulty must still be well represented, more-challenging readings for core assignments are a must, she said. "If you have a core novel for a language arts class that's off by four or five grade levels, you've got to re-evaluate that," she said. For instance, the immensely popular Hunger Games books are often read in 8th grade classes, Ms. Jaeger said, even though the widely used Lexile framework for text difficulty rates them as easy enough for late-elementary-level students. She suggests teachers consider as more-challenging replacements The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, about a woman whose cancer was instrumental to later scientific research, or Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World, an account of British explorers whose ship was trapped in ice in Antarctica in 1914. Many 9th and 10th graders read Agatha Christie's mystery And Then There Were None, which Lexile rates as appropriate for 2nd and 3rd graders. Ms. Jaeger is encouraging teachers to consider instead The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, about an autistic boy's attempt to solve a dog's murder. Instead of The Catcher in the Rye, which Lexile pegs to the 4th grade level, she suggests sophomores could read The Stone Diaries, which Lexile places at the 11th and 12th grades.

 

   

P A G E 1 6

INFOHIO UPDATE - CONTINUED

O M E - R E S A I N S I G H T

 

A Place for Literature

Librarians report having to work to allay two strains of worry among teachers: that the standards' emphasis on nonfiction will reduce the role of literature in the curricu-lum and that every text assigned must be a complex text. "I think those things have been misinterpreted, and peo-ple have freaked out a little bit, thinking literature won't have a place" in classrooms anymore, said Ms. Stripling, the ALA's president-elect. As common-core authors have noted, the recommended balance of nonfiction to fic-tion—half and half in elementary school, rising to a 70-30 split by high school—takes all subjects into account, not just language arts classrooms, she said. Teachers can meet the "complex text" expectations of the standards, she said, by "sprinkling" such readings into their assign-ments, surrounded by a variety of other materials. Coverage of the implementation of the Common Core State Standards and the common assessments is support-ed in part by a grant from the GE Foundation, at www.ge.com/foundation.

Welcome to the OME-RESA INFOhio Family!

OME-RESA welcomes Colleen vanLeeuwen, district librarian at the Lisbon David Anderson Jr.Sr. HS Me-dia Center to the INFOhio family of automated librar-ies.

McKinley Elementary library will be converted during the 2012/2013 school year and will join the 31 districts (115 K-12 libraries) in the OME-RESA region.

If you get the opportunity, email Colleen (colleen.vanleeuwen@omeresa.net) and welcome her to the INFOhio family!

Cataloging Assistance Available!

Do you find yourself buried by books that need to be catalogued ! OME-RESA can help! Contact me at the office and I can schedule a day to meet with you and help you catalog those titles that are being requested by your staff and students. I can also load up the OME-RESA van and work on the books at the office and return them to you completely catalogued, including bar-codes!!

Dave Savastone

dave.savastone@omeresa.net

P A G E 1 7

NETWORK/SYSTEM UPDATE

I S S U E 1 1

TSD Extended Services: Virtual server hosting. Offsite backup. Manage VOIP services. Managed wireless services. Mobil Device Management (MDM) with AirWatch Email archiving. Project consultation.

Virtual Server Hosting:

OME-RESA recently reduced its storage and hosting fees associated with Virtual Server Hosting. This service provides a cost effective, highly scalable and redundant server infrastructure. Great alternative to organizations that may be in the process of refreshing server hardware at their location. Hosting fee includes offsite backup. Please contact lanstaff@omeresa.net if you have any questions concerning this service.

Managed Wireless Services:

OME-RESA offers a managed wireless service. This service may be E-Rate eligible under certain circumstances. The service is scalable, and can be grown as your demands for WIFI capacity grow. Hands off management, with 24X7 support. Great solution for implementing “BYOD” and “one2one” initiatives. Please contact lanstaff@omeresa.net if you have any questions concerning this service.

Mobile Device Management (MDM) with AirWatch:

OME-RESA is now offering MDM through our AirWatch infrastructure. Is compatible with all mobile device platform technologies (iPad, Droid etc). Provides location based management capabilities that can be designed to meet your specific MDM needs. Please contact lanstaff@omeresa.net if you have any questions concerning this service.

M86 Update:

LDAP functionality is now available for your district’s M86 profile. OME-RESA staff can assist you with the deployment of LDAP functionality utilizing your current Active Directory group policy system. This feature provides greater flexibility with custom filter profiles for your staff and/or students. You can find more filter information and “how to” files in the Networking-Internet area of the helpdesk knowledge base. Please contact filter@omeresa.net if you have any questions concerning the M86 web filter.

Internet Access Speed:

The primary Oarnet internet connection remains at 300Mbit. The secondary 300Mbit Comcast internet connection functions together with Oarnet to provide an Active – Active redundant connection.

Network Infrastructure Update:

OME-RESA network is comprised of 144 high-speed fiber optic circuits. Twenty-nine of these connections will be provisioned at 50 or 100Mbps, with the remaining 115 being provisioned from 5 to 20Mbps.

The Fiber connections offer cost-efficient, locally managed, fiber-based broadband Ethernet services and contin-ue to support the high volume of voice, video, data and internet services. These connection types will better ena-ble OME-RESA to provide a converged network infrastructure.

Converged infrastructure packages multiple information technology (IT) components into a single, optimized computing solution. Components of a converged infrastructure solution include servers, data storage devices, networking equipment and software for infrastructure management, automation and orchestration.

A converged infrastructure could be utilized by districts to centralize the management of IT resources, consoli-date systems, increase resource utilization rates, and lower costs.

Regional Fall Technology Meeting:

Date: October 17, 2012

Time: 9am Location: Buckeye Career Center

Agenda: TBA

P A G E 1 8

NETWORK/SYSTEM UPDATE - CONTINUED

O M E - R E S A I N S I G H T

Visit us at www.omeresa.net

OME-RESA

2023 Sunset Blvd. Steubenville, OH 43952

Phone: (740)-283-2050 x116 Fax: (740)-283-1500

E-mail: angie.underwood@omeresa.net