Astoria students are finding success with their first online newspaper, the AstorPost. Student editor Ben R. (junior) says "The paper is a hit with students who find it informative. We cover all kinds of things that aren't in the regular paper."

The online newspaper runs on Drupal software and allows readers to leave comments for authors and discuss current issues. Archive copies of the print version are available on the AstorPost site.

Current AstorPost article topics include current news, sports, opinion pieces and a selection of videos produced by Astoria HS students. The current top story is about a donation of 700 Google Chrome Notebooks the school received from Google.

Join technology-minded teachers from NWRESD area schools for 4 days of intense training.

This year's theme is communication and digital media.

Register Now << Click to register.

Cost: FREE!
Where: NWRESD
Download Flyer  << click

Substitute reimbursement provided for 3 days of training. NOTE: We have enough funds to reimburse ONLY one teacher from each district for each of the three full workshop events.

Jan 28
Open House -What's it all about?
Administrators are invited.
Bring your principal! - Information and agenda

Feb 25
Student blogs, video lessons, Google communication tools...

March 18
Newspapers, teacher blogs, Google Sites and template sharing

April 29
Digital citizenship, media, legal issues, student publishing

Checkout GoogleTutor.com for great articles.

Online application form for course <<< click to apply

Learn all about teaching online courses from the expert teachers of the Florida Virtual School. This course will have one day of face-to-face training and the next 4 days (24 hours) will be conducted virtually. We have space for 20 so apply for your spot today!

Topics covered:

• Introduction to online learning (history, background, standards, future)
• What's it like to be a virtual instructor? (pros and cons, organization, managing time)
• Establishing rapport virtually (calling, email, IM and more)
• Feedback techniques (timeliness, specific and motivational)

We'll work on all these topics and include an introduction to resources on the ORVSD course server that you can use with your students next year.

Dates: Monday, July 26 for our one-day, face-to-face session. The rest of the course will be online.

Cost: Free

Location: NWRESD Washington Service Center
5825 NE Ray Circle Hillsboro, OR 97124-6436
- Google map -

Tuition Credits: We're working on this but expect to offer graduate credit to those who complete the course. Tuition fees are the responsibility of the student.

These FREE technology courses are offered to all NWRESD area teachers.

Register HERE!

This March (2010) OpenClipArt.org released version 2.0 of their giant clipart library. It contains over 24,000 public domain images in *.svg and *.png format. The zip format is a 417 MB download. [Download link]

SVG stands for scaleable vector graphic. That means that the graphics are vector based and that when scaled to larger sizes, they do not pixelate as do *.gif, *.png and *.jpg files. The image below is from a Wikipedia article about SVG and offers a good example.

As of 2009, all major web browsers support *.svg images inside the <img> tag except for Internet Explorer. Click on the attached *.svg file at the end of this message to see if your browser supports *.svg. The file below does not display inside of a Drupal post because Drupal does not yet support *.svg as an image file. There are several groups working on this problem.

A great software tool for creating and editing *.svg files is Inkscape. It's free and runs on Linux, MAC and Windows workstations.