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Hello Everyone!

Shane Dunkle, ITBE 2016 Convention Chair, here. I hope that your holiday season was relaxing and enjoyable!

Here at ITBE, we are starting to gear up for our annual convention next month. All of our speakers are lined up, and this year we have  some great topics and presenters! Peter Sokolowski from Merriam-Webster will be giving our opening plenary speech on Friday and Luciana de Oliveira will be talking about "Planned and Interactional Scaffolding" for our second plenary speaker. On Saturday, we have "Englishes in the World of Textbooks"  presented by Aya Matsuda, and Margo Gottlieb will be our closing plenary speaker on Saturday. We also have a host of featured speakers covering a wide variety of topics. On Friday we have William Stone, Michael Renehan, and Paula Winke, and on Saturday we have Ezekiel Flannery, Karen Beeman, and Marisol Audia. We are very excited to have such a great lineup with such a wealth of experience and talent!

If you are reading this and plan to attend, please don't forget to visit  www.itbe.org and register to get the early bird rates for the convention! Early bird registration ends February 8th, and rates will go up after that. It is also a good time to make sure that your membership is up to date so that you can receive the member rate as well! 

Lastly, I wanted to announce here a new experiment that we are going to try for our 2016 convention. Due to constraints that a lot of educators in our field have experienced from the budget impasse in Illinois last year and continuing into this year, we understand that some educators will not have the opportunity to attend or present at this year's convention. We want to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to experience the great wealth of information that our presenters share with our community, so we are going to try to stream a select number of presentations via the web for all to view and attend virtually. In this way, those who are not able to attend physically, can still benefit. We will be streaming selected presentations live and not recording anything. Unfortunately there are no opportunities for professional development hours, but we thought it would be a great service to those who have been affected by the budget impasse. We are working hard on getting the technology for this up and running, so stay tuned for further developments.

Thank you very much and we look forward to seeing you next month at the convention!

Shane Dunkle
ITBE Vice President & Convention Chair, 2016