a history of curriculum services canada

1995
in all Ontario schools, boards, and faculties of education.
The Executive Director took every opportunity to demonstrate the use of the catalogue to
education associations. She distributed multiple copies of the CD-ROM and discovered that
its searchable database was very popular among those who were computer literate. Also
popular among those who could access it was the online curr_clearinghouse conference
OCC was running on OTF’s ENO site, through which teachers interacted and provided
feedback. Moderation of this conference had recently been taken over by Rose Dotten, a
teacher-librarian, who helped to raise its profile in the education community, drawing
favourable attention to OCC. And, though use of the Internet was still relatively limited, its
potential was increasingly apparent.
In April, issues between OCC and ONTERIS re-emerged, once again jeopardizing ongoing
work on the database. On 23 May, Susan Langley met with Jim Sebastian of MET and Ruth
Marks, Institute Librarian at OISE. Their discussion proved successful, and negotiations
resumed on the OCC/ONTERIS contract. Shortly thereafter, ONTERIS staff demonstrated
the developing STAR database and their new web capability, which was of increasing
interest to OCC since the ENO online project was still experiencing problems.
Despite these ongoing electronic initiatives, however, print was still the most popular format
for the OCC catalogue. The first update, a sixteen-page colour insert with 61 new
resources 16 , was ready in early June and 6000 copies were sent, through MET, to all schools.
In addition, OCC created a condensed version—eight pages with an introduction, update,
and information, but no resources—and partnered with OTF to distribute 135,000 copies
directly to all Ontario teachers. At the same time, surveys were sent to developers
requesting materials for the Stage II catalogue. It was scheduled for completion in January
1996 and would include materials for teachers of grades JK-6 plus any new Transition Years
materials.
As the school year came to an end, OSSTA reasserted its concern over OCC’s duplication of
effort with its curriculum consortia, its desire for a review of OCC’s first year of operations,
and its requirements for the upcoming catalogue. OCC addressed each of these concerns in
turn.
First, they would willingly meet on a regular basis with the Ontario Catholic Curriculum Cooperative
(OCCC) to establish ways to work together. Second, a review of their operations
would take place, but in the fall, after teachers had had an opportunity to work with the
catalogue. They noted that during the summer there would be a pilot project to teach teachers
how to evaluate materials using resources produced by Co-operative Staff Development Projects
Related to Integration. Feedback from this project would be valuable in measuring OCC’s value
and impact. Finally, they agreed that the new catalogue would have a separate section for
materials developed by Catholic boards and that this section would be subdivided, as the Public
boards’ materials section was, into Core Program Areas.
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