Check out the side column of the webpage and you’ll notice a couple of changes in the features offered by OSTA. First and foremost, OSTA now offers an on-line membership option. Through a secure website you can now initiate or renew your OSTA membership and pay by credit card. You can also continue to pay by check through the on-line form. The credit card option will incur a $3 fee assessed by Telusys, our contractor for the secure site (and who’s name will appear on your card statement). Payment-by-check will not be assessed this extra fee, but many folks will no doubt prefer the convenience of the online payment option. This is also the first time we are processing dues on a calendar year basis. Your $10 annual membership now runs January 1 through December 31st each year. If you pay your dues any time between January 1 and the end of July, your membership fee will be good for calendar year 2010. Fees paid after the beginning of August will be credited through the next calendar year as well. It’s a bit of a break, but is NO EXCUSE for letting your membership lapse for 7 months every other year!
Conference and workshop registrations will use this same system and you will be able to customize your order and payment (i.e., Do I want the t-shirt? Do I want to pay an extra fee to attend a conference field trip? etc.) Look for the first use of this system soon as we begin pre-registration for the 3rd annual OSTA Science Safety Summit to be held in late July.
Below the new membership link on the side bar is a link to the new OSTA NING. Unfamiliar with NING? The NING Network is a social network based on a group rather than an individual. There are all kinds of NING’s out there and if you follow the link at the top of our NING you can explore them. One is School 2.0 which in it’s description intends to go beyond the practical discussion of applying the read/write and collaborative Web technologies in the classroom. It is, instead, a larger discussions of how education, learning, and our physical school spaces can (or should) change because of the changing nature of our social and economic lives brought on by these technologies. There is even an NING about using NING in education. As well as the Educator’s PLN (personal learning network), among many, many others. (Even the Pickens Plan has a NING)
We hope you will join the OSTA NING to begin a Professional Learning Community to share and explore ideas with other Oklahoma science educators as well as discuss OSTA and how to best utilize this organization. We’ve already established groups for special interests like Science Competitions (moderated by Central Oklahoma Science Fair Director Beth Allen), Educational Technology (moderated by Putnam City High School teacher Jody Bowie), and group especially for beginning teachers and prospective teachers. Click the link and join the OSTA NING. We are reviewing the names and addresses all who ask to join, but once approved, your first task is to post your picture and join the discussion. What to discuss? That’s up to you, the place is wide open right now.
Finally, you may have noticed a few weeks ago we took down the ability to register to the NewsBlog. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to keep spammers from registering on the site. I really don’t know why people with email addresses from other countries (.ru, .de, .cz) would subscribe to the OSTA website, but I don’t imagine it’s all that good. So we will gradually work make the OSTA web site a members-only site for email notifications and comments (although it will always remain in the public domain for visitors). We currently have over 700 people who have subscribed for email notifications and hopefully all will take this opportunity to join OSTA to stay up-to-date with the latest Oklahoma science education news.