Firstly a sincere and unreserved apology for the lack of communication from the association this year.
As predominately full time teachers we have been hit with an additional work load as many of you have and this has resulted in a number of our regular DATTA SA features not occurring this year.
I will address matters for 2020 in sections:
Finance / Grants
Our backend system has now enabled “PDF Invoices” which has been a requested feature since we moved to the more secure and new website. This has been enabled and there are a few tweaks to be made but this will result in automatic PDF’s able to be downloaded for your finance team.
All grants awarded for 2020 will be processed to allow full acquittal of the funds by January 2022. This extension is due to lack of processing on our end. Again apologises and I will be in touch with those individuals this Term.
Membership Extension 2021
Please note that as a result in the lack of our regular PD’s this year and information to our members we are in the process of discussion to extend all memberships for next calendar year. I will confirm this shortly – you will not have to do anything on your end as your accounts will be automatically updated.
New Members Online Courses 2021
One area we have discussed for as long as I’ve been a sitting executive member is online courses or ways to members to share their professional work. Recently in the last month our membership application that you use to sign up has enabled a new feature called “courses”. This enables a professional course to be built similar to providers such as Lynda, Grok Learning and others you may have used.
As part of your memberships we will include access to courses and enable an option for DATTA SA members to share their own work. Full author credit and course content protection is built into the courses which will no doubt encourage our technology community to develop an extensive online resource catalogue over time.
Behind the scenes I am in early days testing the feature set and quite excited to get this out to you. A screenshot below shows the general layout, with embedded videos, audio, guided questions and slide decks all features able to be added. For 2021 a course on Year 8 Robotics is being developed over the summer break to start the ball rolling.
Virtual AGM 2020 – proposed date
The proposed date for our moved AGM is Monday 7th December at 5:00-7:00pm. This AGM will be conducted online with members able to attend virtually. I am confirming with the executive a few details around the date and will email all members and friends of DATTA SA a link to attend.
Again as before, I personally apologise for the lack of information to our members this year. We always look to improve and with a new year around the corner I am confident that 2021 will see us return with exciting new PD’s and content that you have been use to for many years as a DATTA member.
Yours Sincerely,
Emil Zankov, President of DATTA SA