Register Your School for 'Spirit of Mandela Week'
This year Nelson Mandela turns 90 years old and to celebrate this milestone, the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund is encouraging all schools across Canada to celebrate Spirit of Mandela Week from April 21 - 25. The three purposes of this event are
- to educate Canadian youth about the history of South Africa and the life of Nelson Mandela,
- to empower students to make a difference through volunteerism, and
- to raise funds to help disadvantaged children in South Africa through the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund.
ETFO is proud to be a sponsor of this event and encourages members to register their schools at [Link no longer exists].
The statute which governs teacher collective bargaining is called the 
Labour Relations Act. Including teachers, it covers 1.6 million private and public sector employees in Ontario. There are currently 9,437 collective agreements in force which were bargained under the Labour Relations Act.
Look for more bite size chunks of information on collective bargaining in future editions of @ETFO/FEEO.
Do you know about the OERB?
The OERB is the Ontario Educational Resource Bank--a repository of more than 12,000 free online resources for both teachers and students from Kindergarten to grade 12. Released in January 2007 by e-Learning Ontario, this website contains lesson plans, activities, videos, maps, and interactive multimedia objects in a variety of formats. These growing resources are searchable by grade, course/subject, strand, overall expectations, and key words. Also under development for the OERB are 400 interactive resources for the K to 3 curriculum. The number of resources increases daily as teachers share their classroom materials through the OERB.
Some examples of the K-12 resources you'll find in the OERB are
- a game for kindergarten students that challenges them to match coloured shapes with coloured bears,
- an interactive multimedia object that helps grade 1 students learn through sound and pictures that a compound word is made up of two smaller words, and
- a lesson to help grades 3 - 8 students learn how to predict and connect new reading with prior knowledge.
To sample some of the resources available, visit the OERB resources page. To login to see all of the resources, contact your district's e-Learning representative for the user name and password. Your principal may also have this information.
ETFO Welcomes a New Deputy General Secretary
Marilies Rettig was appointed to the position of Deputy General Secretary with the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario effective March 1, 2008.
Marilies is a former president of the Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association, the Ontario Teachers’ Federation, and the Canadian Teachers’ Federation. Prior to joining ETFO, Marilies was an Executive Board Member of Education International and local president of the Eastern Ontario Unit of OECTA.
We very much look forward to the skills, knowledge, and strong commitment to public education that Marilies will bring to her work at ETFO.