As always in January, I am starting the New Year with great anticipation. This time, I am particularly excited about the IALLT 2013 conference, which will be held from June 11-15, 2013 at Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The 2013 conference will be unique in many ways: it will be co-hosted by two different institutions, i.e. a university and a K-12 school, it will feature ACTFL’s Teacher of the Year 2012, and, most importantly, it will provide opportunities for language instructors and language technology professionals to explore different types of learning spaces.
During the Summer Leadership Meeting in Fort Lauderdale in June, the IALLT Board and Council had the opportunity to get together with the conference hosts for the IALLT 2013 conference: Frank Kruger-Robbins from Pine Crest School, and Michael Horswell from Florida Atlantic University. What makes this conference site particularly exciting is the fact that both host institutions boast 21st century learning spaces and are therefore most suitable locations for a pre-conference workshop that I am particularly excited about, the Tour of the Learning Spaces, which is an updated version of our traditional pre-conference Lab Tours. In addition to learning more about the design of different types of learning spaces, the participants of the IALLT 2013 conference will have an opportunity to look at different furniture solutions that, combined with interactive technology tools, create spaces for active collaborative learning. Other pre-conference workshops will focus on designing and managing language learning centers, while the conference sessions will address a variety of topics on language learning with technology.
Save the date for IALLT 2013 (June 11-15, 2013)! Submit a proposal (for more information about topics and types of sessions, see http://www.iallt.org/iallt_2013_3). You will find more conference information at http://2013.iallt.org/
I hope to see you this summer in Fort Lauderdale!
Ute S. Lahaie, Ph.D.
IALLT President, 2011-2013
Liberal Arts 2.0 