I hope you made a special vacation trip this summer or attended a conference that encouraged and stimulated your thinking about assessment or treatment issues concerning the children you serve. It's always good to get that boost from networking with other clinicians and learning something new. Everyone needs that extra new learning material, because it just makes life and work more interesting. For me, the Bilingual Therapies Symposium in Las Vegas was that extra shot in the arm that I needed for this academic year. I want to thank John Consalvi for a great job in bringing together some excellent speakers. The clinicians who attended I believe gained from the networking and learning, but for me, as a speaker, I gain so much when I can share what I've been learning and get feedback from clinicians that my work is useful to these working clinicians. I really believe that all of the presenters got that positive feeling when they presented at this conference. It was a great faculty for another Bilingual Therapies Symposium. We're there to network with other clinicians and faculty and learn what's new in our field and how we can improve services to the children we serve.
I also attended the ASHA Schools Conference. That was an excellent conference. There were excellent speakers, but what made this a great conference was that all of the conference handouts were put together as an anthology. So you can get the anthology from ASHA through their website. Of course, it isn't anything like being there. So I hope that you'll consider one of these two conferences for next year.
So what about the rest of this year? Are you making plans to go to any conferences locally, statewide, nationally, or internationally? I'm working on 3 state conferences this year, 2 in Missouri, and 1 in Illinois. The one I'm committing a great deal of time to is one concerning Hispanics issues in Missouri. If you get involved in your state association, or even in a local meeting, you and the conference attendees benefit. Consider working with your local or state association to plan and work on committees.
Here are some national conferences that you might consider for the coming year.
October 7-9, 2004: Council for Learning Disabilities, 26th International Conference on Learning Disabilities. Las Vegas, NV. http://www.cldinternational.org.
October 27-30, 2004: 16th Annual CHADD International Conference on Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: Nashville, TN. http://www.chadd.org.
November 3-6, 2004: International Dyslexia Association, 55th Annual Conference. Philadelphia, PA. http://www.interdys.org.
November 10-13, 2004: 2004 NAEYC Annual Conference and Expo. Anaheim, CA. http://www.naeyc.org.
November 18-20, 2004: American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, Annual Conference. Philadelphia, PA. http://www.asha.org.
December 4-8, 2004: Annual Division for Early Childhood International Conference on Children with Special Needs and Their Families, Chicago, IL. http://www.dec-sped.org.
January 19-22: National Association for Bilingual Education. Annual convention, San Antonio, TX. http://www.nabe.org
April 6-9, 2005: Council for Exceptional Children, Annual Convention. Baltimore, MD. http://www.cec.sped.org.
May 1-5, 2005: International Reading Association, 50th Annual Conference, San Antonio, TX. http://www.reading.org.
There are so many other local or state conferences that I have not mentioned. I hope that you‚ll consider helping and attending these smaller conferences.
I want to recommend just a couple of websites that you might check out while your looking for an interesting conference for this coming year. Look at Bilingual Therapies website and look at the Links of Interest. There are some great sites to consider and then bookmark. The second one you might search is the Latin American Network Information Center from the University of Texas (Lanic.utexas.edu). You might be interested in surfing through both of these sites.
Hope to see you at a conference this year.
