Featured Speakers

Thank you for your interest in the Illinois Online Conference! The 2008 conference was held on February 13-15, 2008.

If you are a current member of the IOC Conference Community, please use the login form above to log into the Conference Community area.

The presenations will be held within the IOC Conference Community. You may access the 2007 IOC Conference Community by clicking on the "Log In Here" link located in the header of this page.

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Mignon Fogarty

Mignon Fogarty

Title: Grammar Girl
Date: Febuary 13, 2008 Time: 3:00pm CST
Topic: Grammar Girl: LIVE

Presentation Description:

Mignon Fogarty, host of the award-winning Grammar Girl podcast, will deliver her live, interactive webcast keynote on February 13, 2008, kicking off three days of exciting online collaboration and networking among hundreds of education and training professionals worldwide.

The award-winning Grammar Girl podcast provides short, friendly tips to improve your writing. Covering the grammar rules and word choice guidelines that can confound even the best writers, Grammar Girl makes complex grammar questions simple with memory tricks to help you recall and apply those troublesome grammar rules. Whether English is your first language or second language, Grammar Girl’s punctuation, style, and business tips will make you a better and more successful writer. Mignon Fogarty is the creator and host of Grammar Girl. Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast.

Biography:

Mignon Fogarty is the creator of Grammar Girl and founder of Quick and Dirty Tips. A magazine writer, technical writer, and entrepreneur, she has served as a senior editor and producer at a number of health and science web sites. She has a B.A. in English from the University of Washington in Seattle and an M.S. in biology from Stanford University.

Mignon believes that learning is fun, and the vast rules of grammar are wonderful fodder for lifelong study. She strives to be a friendly guide in the writing world. Her arch enemy is the evil Grammar Maven who inspires terror in the untrained and is neither friendly nor helpful.

'I receive e-mail messages every week from teachers who are using Grammar Girl in their classrooms, and I'm looking forward to interacting with so many educators during an extended, live, online edition of Grammar Girl at the Illinois Online Conference,' said Fogarty. Grammar Girl was recently voted 'Best Education Podcast' in the Podcast Awards, in which over 1.3 million unique people voted. 'I’m an avid listener of Mignon’s podcast,' said Jonathan Finkelstein, Executive Producer of LearningTimes, one of the organizations that produce IOC. 'Her fun and utterly digestible approach to instruction is a great model for teachers everywhere, no matter what topics they teach or what technologies they use. Grammar Girl will provide a fitting opening to this year’s event.'



Rachel Gutter

Rachel Gutter

Title: School Sector Manager
Date: February 14, 2008 Time: 12:00pm CST
Topic: Green Schools: Benefits for Students, the Environment, and the Bottom Line

Presentation Description:

Schools all over the country are 'going green' with Illinois blazing the trail. As of last August, all state funded school construction in Illinois is required to be green (Public Act #95-0416). Green schools can have a tremendous impact on student health, test scores, teacher retention, school operational costs and the environment. Built right, green schools are optimized for student performance, with ample natural light, high-quality acoustics and air that is safe to breathe. The building itself becomes an interactive teaching tool, engaging students in hands on, project based learning.

Learn more about the benefits of green schools and the US Green Building Council’s LEED for Schools Green Building Rating System, which provides parents, teachers and the community with a 'report card' for their school buildings – verifying that the school has been built to meet the highest level of performance. Find out how green schools save an average $100,000 a year while inspiring a new generation of sustainability natives.

Biography:

As the School Sector Manager for the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), Rachel works on a national level to promote and facilitate high performance, green school construction. She is responsible for the development and promotion of the LEED for Schools Green Building Rating System, a market-specific LEED Rating System that recognizes the unique nature and educational aspects of the design and construction of K-12 educational facilities. Rachel also presents at conferences and conventions around the country to educate various stakeholders on the myriad benefits of high performance, green schools.

Rachel has a BA from Tufts University and has experience in the fields of green building consulting and commercial and residential sustainable design. She also worked for the Green Building Program of Montgomery County Public Schools – one of the only school systems in the country to mandate green school construction.

USGBC is a non-profit organization with a core purpose of transforming the way buildings and communities are designed, built and operated, enabling an environmentally and socially responsible, healthy and prosperous environment that improves the quality of life.


Julian Lombardi

Julian Lombardi

Title: Assistant Vice President
Date: Feburary 15, 2008 Time: 12:00pm CST
Topic: Introduction to Croquet

Presentation Description: Croquet is a powerful new open source software development environment for creating and deploying deeply collaborative multi-user online applications on multiple operating systems and devices. Croquet features a peer-based network architecture that supports communication, collaboration, resource sharing, and synchronous computation between multiple users on multiple devices. Using Croquet, software developers can create and link powerful and highly collaborative cross-platform multi-user 2D and 3D applications and simulations - making possible the distributed deployment of very large scale, richly featured and interlinked virtual environments.

Biography: Julian Lombardi is Duke University's assistant vice president of Academic Services and Technology Support, senior research scholar with Duke University's program in Information Science + Information Studies, adjunct faculty member with Duke University's Department of Computer Science, one of the Croquet project's six original architects, and chairman of the board of directors of the Croquet Consortium.