Why present at a conference?

It's that time of year again when I find myself preparing to present at the 2011 Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference at the end of the month.  I am fortunate to present with my good friend and colleague, Nicole Tomaselli, we have been co-presenting since 2005 at this conference.  As I worked on my presentation, a few teachers mentioned to me they would love to present but it's so much work and asked me why I continued to present,

The answer, this is my professional development.  A time to reflect on the impact I had on teachers and students over the past year to plan several of my next projects.

As I updated my Web 2.0 Social Media Glogster poster from last year I added my blog post for my Skype Project World Read Aloud Day that I did with Nicole's studentes.  I also connected one of my special education classes with another group of students in a near by distict.  I found this project on twitter with a post from Angela Maiers.

I also plan on presenting on Classroom Collaboration Using Googles Apps for Education, based several projects that I did with teachers and students last year.

I am hoping that participants at this years conference not only attend the sessions but walk away and put into practice many of the great ways they can engage students in the classroom with Web 2.0 technologies and social media tools. 

Maybe some of the partcipants from last year will share a classroom success story based on inspiration from the previous year.