News from OSAPAC
The Ontario Software Acquisition Program Advisory Committee provides a wealth of resources for Ontario educators.

As an advisory committee, they make recommendations to the Ministry of Education about what titles to license for use in the province. Most titles have teacher takehome rights for lesson preparation.

The following titles are newly announced by OSAPAC for provincial licensing.

  • Mathville Grade 1
    (Mathematics)
  • Acrobat Connect Professional
    (Web Collaboration)
  • QuickBooks English 2005
    (Accounting, Business)
  • QuickBooks French 2004
    (Accounting, Business)
  • QuickBooks Student Version
    (Accounting, Business)
  • QuickTax English
    (Accounting, Business)

OSAPAC has addressed most of the stated acquisition priorities for this fiscal year. Priority setting for 2007-2008 is under way. If you'd like to have some input to titles that need to be licensed provincially, or professional development needs, complete the survey at: http://www.osapac.org/dbsurvey/surveyintro2006.asp

Did you know that the suite of provincially licensed titles has some of the very best assistive technology titles? Here is a flyer outlining some of these titles.

Curriculum Expectations
http://www.osapac.org/dbOess/ExpectationBrowse06.asp
One of the services provided on the website is a correlation between Ontario Curriculum expectation and Ministry of Education licensed software. This resource is constantly updated as new titles are licensed and also as new curriculum comes along. The big thing this fall will undoubtedly be support for the new Language curriculum. Look for the new expectations to be analyzed and added to the database.

Learning Object Repository
http://www.osapac.org/dbOESS/ResourceBrowse.asp
This is one of the hottest phenomena on the internet. They are basically locations where you can grab a resource to help out in the classroom. OSAPAC has its own repository. What makes it unique is that the resources are written by Ontario educators to support software that is Ministry licensed. The resources are reviewed at the board level and then by the OSAPAC committee before they appear online to ensure quality and appropriateness for the Ontario Curriculum.

Don't hesitate to check out the repository contents. The repository is approaching its 120,000th download.

RSS Feeds
Stay on top of OSAPAC happenings by subscribing to one of three RSS feeds.

What's New at OSAPAC?
http://www.osapac.org/osapac.xml

OSAPAC Newly Released Titles
http://www.osapac.org/osapac_new_releases.xml

OSAPAC Learning Objects - Top 10 List
http://www.osapac.org/osapac_repository.xml

You can view all three feeds online at the GEC Computers in the Classroom website by clicking on this link.

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