Because of the tight job market, many CALI member schools have asked us if their recent grads can continue to access CALI Lessons to keep skills sharp.

We are happy to announce that CALI will, by default, extend CALI Lesson access for at least six months after students at member schools have graduated.

To access CALI Lessons, recent grads can simply login at www.cali.org using the same CALI account they used while in school.

There is often confusion surrounding the CALI authorization code among new students. Here are a few tips and a 2 minute video that should help avoid confusion. Please pass them on to your students:

The CALI Staff will show you, step-by-step, how you and your students can use the new CALI website (www.cali.org).

Register for the webinar (Friday, August 14, 3:00 PM Eastern)

All law students, faculty, and staff are invited to learn how to:

- Register with the new website
- Access CALI Lessons
- Create a LessonLink
- Learn about other new and improved features of the CALI website.

CALI reps and password contacts are especially encouraged to attend so they can answer student questions throughout the semester about the new site.

You can find last week's webinar video on Twitter from a Law School Communications Professional's Perspective here.

This goes along with next week's webinar on Twitter from a Law Prof's Perspective.

Plagiarism and Punctuation and Grammar: at every school these are basic issues that absolutely must be addressed for your new students. But there is only so much in-class time to devote to these issues.

We highly recommend school administrators, faculty, and students take a look at CALI's Plagiarism Lesson by Prof. Rebecca Trammell and Punctuation and Grammar, Basic and Advanced, Lessons by Prof. Wayne Sheiss.

We know many schools that have students sign a statement confirming they read a plagiarism/ethics code. But the plagiarism lesson actually makes students think about and recognize the issues involved. So assign this lesson to your incoming students as well.

And students, if not assigned by your school, give the Punctuation and Grammar lessons (part 2/advanced here) a try on your own to brush up on grammar for your legal writing classes before you get too busy.

The new website should be up and running for everyone now.

Check it out at www.cali.org and give us your feedback.

Make sure you sign up and attend the upcoming webinar walkthrough of the new site (Friday, Aug. 14th at 3:00 Eastern) so you can answer inevitable questions from students about changes to the site.

CALI will once again be sending DVD-Roms out to all member US law schools along with authorization code cards...enough for ALL of your students. They should be arriving towards the end of July/early August.

AALL has formed a partnership with CALI to provide all of its member librarians with access to CALI Lessons.

From AALL's February 2009 e-Newsletter:

In addition to continued access to popular services like CALI Lessons, ClassCaster, Awards, The Conference for Law School Computing, and Instapoll; this year CALI provided member schools with more innovative services than ever. 

We gave you brand new services.

• We launched the Legal Education Commons.
• We began producing bi-weekly, free webinars (and video) aimed at helping you learn about and use technology in a law school environment.
• CALI gives members use of MediaNotes software to help evaluate students with video.
• You now can keep up with us on Facebook, Twitter, blip.tv (videos), and an updated Spotlight Blog.

We expanded our library of CALI Lessons.

• Around 50 new lessons added in the last year,
• now 800 lessons total,
• which your students used in record numbers.

And there is even more innovation on the horizon.

• eLangdell will launch soon.
• New CALI Lessons in Constitutional Law, Legal Research, and Criminal Procedure and more are on the way.
• An update to CALI's website is in the works.

This fun 15 minute screencast of Executive Director John Mayer's AALS presentation will give you an idea of what we as an organization are working on, what we are thinking about, and where we plan to go.

So, in light of the list above, you probably wonder how much your organization's dues are set to change. The answer is...

Sarah Walton, professor of justice studies at the University of Maine at Augusta, is using CALI Lessons to teach troops in Afghanistan.

Now the 5,000-student college is reaching out to active-duty personnel stationed overseas. UMA will offer priority slots in five summer courses this year to a Maine Army National Guard unit stationed in Kandahar.

. . .

Walton said her "Legal Research and Materials" course will include components from . . . online activities offered by the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction.

Click here to read the article.

This is one of the reasons a CALI membership for undergraduate programs with distance learning classes, or classes with some web-based components, makes so much sense, especially for paralegal or legal studies programs. Once your school joins, all of your students and faculty receive unlimited use of our CALI Lessons through our website.

Contact Austin, agroothuis@cali.org, if you have any questions.