"Follow Sandy across the state. Connecting Members, Together we will make a difference."

SDEA's Sandy Arseneault blogs on her trip across South Dakota, identifying local leaders and members who support SDEA's membership recruitment campaign.

Visit Sandy's blog ...

or Visit SDEA's Virtual Membership Campaign Social Network, a network designed to support effective management and sharing of information, documents, publications and other campaign related material and news.

Employees increasingly expect to use the internet at work for their own personal use in return for longer hours, taking work home with them and interrupting vacations. This has a number of security, productivity, bandwidth and legal ramifications that require organizations to create and implement a web usage policy that is backed up by effective web filtering tools. This paper discusses how to create a policy that balances an organization’s need for protection against an individual’s expectations.

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BELLEVUE - The Bellevue School District teacher's strike just got more interesting as teachers started posting their side of the story on a popular video-hosting Web site. And parents by the hundreds are taking notice of their online message as the strike enters its second week.

The Bellevue teachers union has posted at least three videos on youtube.com, each with its own theme. (Scroll down to the bottom of the story to see two of the videos.)

What’s New?

NEA has partnered with the GEM Exchange, Gateway to Educational Materials, and JES & Co to support Gateway to 21st Century Skills, a website that combines state-of the art search technologies and a complete database of state academic standards for core subjects. The Gateway is your link to the resources you need to make learning meaningful and fun for your students.

New information about 21st century learning resources is being added every week to the Gateway. Don’t miss out on these great new additions. Here are just a few more recent examples of new items that you can find on the Gateway for you and your students:

College funding at center of Got Tuition?'s message
Group hopes to inform students on big issues

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The War in Iraq, Wall Street and renewable energy dominate the presidential candidate discourse and the public eye. One organization aims to refocus it.

Got Tuition?, a nonpartisan group owned and operated by the National Education Association, will be making a stop at Kent State Oct. 15. The group seeks to educate student voters about issues that affect them.

"We're trying to get people to say, 'I guess I should care about this, since it's my money,'" said Danielle Sherritt, chair of the Ohio Student Education Association, a branch of the NEA.

Got Tuition? will set up a booth outside the M.A.C. Center to pass out information about both presidential candidates, Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain.

"As college students, we have to be our own activists," said Sherritt, who is also a Kent State graduate student for gifted education. "Most people that have graduated from college pay off their loans, and then they really don't care."

Although Got Tuition? is nonpartisan, the NEA endorses Obama largely for his support of increasing Pell Grants. Obama co-sponsored a bill in 2007 that would have raised the maximum Pell Grant from $4,050 to $5,100.

President Lester Lefton said the availability and amount of Pell Grants should be one of the biggest issues for a student voter, though no one should vote based on a single issue.

"The most important thing that they can do at the federal level is to increase the Pell Grants," he said. "The working poor and their families are lacking in economic resources and need those Pell Grants to pay the first five or six grand of a student's bill."

Right now, the maximum Pell Grant award is $4,731, up about $700 from four years ago.