Week 4 - Thinking Out Loud- Where Will I Present?

The Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education or AACE
offers several conferences around the world. It appears their network is pretty strong although I am not sure exactly how many members are in the organization. They have two conferences that I am interested in.

SITE- Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education. this conference, taking place in March 2012. This conference is in it's 20th year and I believe has a well established conference of industry professionals.

The AACE conference E-LEARN, 2011 - World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare & Higher Education also peaked my interest as I still have corporate training and motivational speaking as an option.I feel if I attend a conference like this one as well as one primarily attended by educators I will be able to stay in tune with the overall growth of the profession. This conference takes place in October 2011.

I am not solely interested in membership to an organization that will only provide me with resources and contacts. I want to find one that has room for me to grow into support and leadership roles. I think this is important for my continued professional growth.

Another organization and conference that caught my attention was ISTE. I became aware of the International Society of Technology Educators a few months ago. This conference brings together education professionals for networking and training, and offers a huge exposition featuring all of the top education resources. Companies like Smart, Houghton Mifflin and Mimio are all on hand in a huge exhibition center showing off the latest educational resources. I feel like this would be a huge opportunity for me to gain on multiple fronts. I plan to attend next month at the Philadelphia conference as an observer and perhaps present in 2012.

For all of these events my topic will be Technology Integration for the purpose of Community Building. Closing the digital divide should be addressed on multiple fronts and I believe that I have found an interesting topic that attendees may want to know more about. In my literature review research I came across a number of articles that dealt with the global digital divide on a community level. I find it interesting that not many non-profit professionals have taken this on as a topic of discussion. I have discovered some TED videos on the subject and Aneesh Chopra, one of President Obama's senior aides gave a speech at a conference I attended last November. I feel like I can add to the global dialogue on this subject. Now that I have defined my scope, I am looking forward to bringing the presentation together and presenting it soon.