3 Organizations Would Support My Area of Interest

This post is about the 3 organizations that I would like to join as support and resources for my academic interest in K-12 technology integration and teacher education. I chose the following three organizations not only because the topics they focus are closely related to the field I'm in and I would like to attend their conference, but also because they provide so many great opportunities to build connections with other professional scholars and educators and to join their professional learning communities for sharing up-to-date issues and thoughts.


1. Association of Educational Communications and Technology (AECT)

Last year, I attended AECT conference as my very first academic conference as a first year doctoral student. Although I was just a volunteer in AECT conference last year without any presentation, I had a wonderful time. I think attending AECT conference could be a great opportunity for me to build connections with experienced and young scholars in my field. The community in AECT conference was a perfect size that I could obtain all sorts of information that I'm interested in and talk to different presenters within a comfortable conference environment. I'm especially interested in the Teacher Education Division, Culture, Learning and Technology Division, Design & Development Division, and School Media & Technology Division. Moreover, the Graduate Student Assembly is my target community where I can gather news and opportunities for graduate students provided by AECT as well as learn from experts in this field by joining their social networks such as GSA Facebook group.


2. International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE)

The main reason for me to select ISTE as one of the three organizations that I would like to join is because that their "goal of all conference content is to help educators develop students' learning, problem-solving, critical-thinking, creativity, communication and collaboration abilities"and "explore practices and strategies for achieving digital age learning in learning environment". That means ISTE conference content would be the resources to support my W200 teaching (Using Computers in Education) and my research interests (teacher education and technology integration). Moreover, the primary groups of audience in ISTE community are both teacher in practice and researchers. So, I assume that ISTE conference is a good learning community for me to hear lots of conversations between research and practice. In ISTE conference, I would like to delve more into three areas of focuses - Digital Age Teaching & Learning, Professional Learning, and Technology Infrastructure.

Note: The ISTE Facebook page is a good resource for getting new information about educational trends and issues and topics people are interested. Lots of the posts on ISTE Facebook page are from ISTE blog where gathers all kinds of interesting, up-to-date issues and discussion.


3. American Educational Research Association (AERA)

My third choice of organization that I would like to join is AERA. Honestly, I know AERA conference is a big thing for many graduate students and scholars, but I was not very sure that I would like it very much or not. Probably I will know more once I attend the conference in the near future. On their website, I saw a wide variety of focused areas in education are included in AERA,. Also, over 28% of AERA community members are graduate students from all over the world. Although AERA is not an organization specifically focus on educational technology issues, it would be a good place to receive broader types of information from different educational areas.