Marymount Education Faculty Leads International Technology Conference

Marymount Education Faculty Leads International Technology Conference

“The Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE) is an international, academic association of teacher educators, researchers, practitioners and collaborating organizations across multiple disciplines.  SITE creates and disseminates knowledge enhancing teacher education through the use of technology across a global context.  SITE promotes research, scholarship, and innovation across its membership.  It is the only organization solely focused on integrating technology into teacher education.” (SITE)

Dr. Elizabeth Langran, Professor of Education, just completed her first year of a three-year term as the president of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE). Her leadership role includes oversight of three different journals and an annual research handbook, partnerships, events, and leading the international conference. Annually, SITE holds a week-long conference where education professionals from across the world come together.  During this week, there are multiple discussions and activities being held.  The driving purpose behind these discussions and activities is the dissemination of knowledge in order to enhance teacher education through the use of technology within a global context (SITE).

This year the SITE conference began March 30th and ended April 2nd.  However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, SITE was unable to hold the conference in its usual in-person format. Instead SITE held the conference entirely online, in order to ensure that the conference was still openly available to the SITE members who were international.  Among some of the key topics addressed this year were view of gender play difference within scaffolding (SITE), how to make computing accessible to people on the Autism spectrum (SITE), how to express virtual compassion towards students (SITE), manage the online environment to provide hands-on experiment for STEM (SITE), and more (SITE).  Participants could also join activities of SIG meetings, poster sessions, concurrent sessions, keynotes, and workshops (Dr. Langran).

The School of Education is proud that Dr. Langran’s international leadership role brings recognition to Marymount. She collaborates with the top scholars in her field of technology and teacher education, which has been one of the important reasons that motivated her to run for president of SITE. “I get to work with some amazing leaders in my field from all over the world, which does present challenges when scheduling online meetings across many time zones,” said Dr. Langran. “Since I teach the educational technology courses at the undergraduate, masters, and doctoral levels, I need to make sure I stay on top of the latest research in my rapidly-changing field. Our conference presentations and proceedings are peer reviewed and so it’s an honor to see the best of what’s out there and make sure that my teaching at Marymount is well-informed.”

Written by Olivia Edwards

#EducationalTechnology #Leadership #Technology #SITE