A VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ONE AND ALL! We welcome our new members and thank all of our members for their support. At the January Executive Board meeting, the board reviewed the upcoming calendar year, confirmed some plans, and worked towards finalizing others. Below are some of the highlights of the coming year.

After a successful pilot program in Silicon Valley, CA, Google is taking its FREE K-12 training program on the road. The Academy is an intensive one-day event where participants get hands-on experience with Google’s free products and other technologies, learn about innovation instructional strategies, receive resources to share with colleagues, and immerse themselves in an innovative corporate environment. Upon completion, Academy participants become Google Certified Teachers who share what they learn with other K-12 educators in their local region.

50 educators from the tri-state area will be selected to attend the February 15th Academy based on their passion for teaching, their experience as trainers, and their use of technology in K-12 settings. Applications for the NY event are due by January 21, 2007. For further information, go to http://www.google.com/educators/gta

Visit the NJAET Blog and join in the discussion. Do you have a suggestion for other topics? Contact us at njaet@njaet.org and let us know what you are interested in discussing. Here are the main topics planned for the coming months:

• January 2007 - District Technology Plans: How do you plan for success with your district technology plan?
  
  
• February 2007 - Personal Computing Trends: 1 to 1 Computing: Everywhere but School?
  
  
• March 2007 - Visual Literacy: How can we help students develop the visual literacy skills needed by 21st century learners?
  
  
• April 2007 - Extending Children’s literacy through the Internet: How can we use the Internet to extend students' interest in and understanding of children's literature?
  
  
• May 2007 - Effective Uses for PowerPoint: How do you make Powerpoint powerful?

The deadline for nominating someone for Technologist of the Year is April 1, 2007. The Technologist of the Year Flyer for the 2007 awards program is available on the NJAET website in PDF format. Who do you know who might be eligible to win this award, maybe even yourself? Check out the online guidelines and application form for this program and put on your thinking cap.

Congratulations again to Grace Poli, NJAET's Technologist of the Year for 2006. Grace graces the cover of the December 2006 issue of the "THE Journal."

Congratulations also to Dr. David Cochran, president-elect of the NJAET Executive Board. Dave, along with co-authors Jack Conklin and Susannah Modin, discuss the latest updates to Bloom's Taxonomy and the implications for teaching with technology. See the February Issue of Learning & Leading with Technology for the article.

NJAET's Annual Fall Conference will be held on Tuesday, October 9, 2007 at Georgian Court University in Lakewood, New Jersey. This year's conference will include special two-hour, hands-on sessions integrated within the one day conference rather than as pre-conference workshops on a separate day. Watch for the Call for Presenters, coming in March.

Additional presenters from the 19th Annual NJAET Conference have been gracious enough to share handouts from their sessions. Check the NJAET website or go directly to the list of conference handouts on the site to see all of the handouts that are now available.

At the January Executive Board Meeting, the NJAET Newsletter was renamed the NJAET Journal. Together with the NJAET News (what you are currently reading), you now have two opportunities for submitting information for publication.

Educators who are using technology are a wonderful source of recommendations for software and hardware and the ones who know best who is integrating technology creatively in the classroom. If you are using a product and love what it can do for your students, let us know about it. If your students are enjoying learning because some aspect of technology is being used creatively, let us know about it. And if you know of someone else who is doing these things, let us know that too. Contact Dr. Dave Cochran or Dr. Cathy Grimaldi and they will be happy to get your information. They will even write it up for you if you feel you are unable to do that.