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New Location!

This year's PAGE conference will be held at the Four Points North by Sheraton Hotel in Mars, a suburb of Pittsburgh. Ample free parking is available, and the hotel is within a 30-minute drive to various attractions, including downtown Pittsburgh, the Carnegie Museums, Hartwood Acres, and the Grove City Outlet Mall. In addition, numerous shops and restaurants are within a one mile radius.

Room rates are $120 per night, with breakfast included for hotel guests. Contact the hotel at (724) 776-6900 or visit http://www.starwoodmeeting.com/Book/PAGE2010 to make your reservation. You must mention the PAGE conference in order to qualify for this discounted rate.

Flying In?

Super Shuttle has offered a special promotion for PAGE conference attendees. Round trip transportation from the airport to the Sheraton is $34. Book online at www.supershuttle.com, making sure to indicate promotion code QKC3V.

Children's Program

Commonwealth Connections Academy is sponsoring this year's Children's Program. It will occur on the last day of the conference (April 24th). More details to follow.

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Jean Peterson

Dr. Jean Sunde Peterson, professor and coordinator of school counselor preparation at Purdue University, was a classroom teacher for many years and was involved in teacher education prior to graduate work in counseling at The University of Iowa. A licensed mental health counselor with considerable experience counseling gifted youth and their families, she conducts school-based workshops on academic underachievement, cultural values as related to identification for special programs, prevention-oriented school counseling, listening skills for teachers, and social and emotional development of high-ability students-all of these related to her practitioner-oriented research. She is author of The Essential Guide to Talking with Gifted Teens and co-editor of Models of Counseling Gifted Children, Adolescents, and Young Adults, among over 80 publications. She is currently a member of NAGC’s Board of Directors and formerly was chair of the organization’s Counseling and Guidance Division.

Join us on Saturday, April 24, 2010, to hear Dr. Peterson's keynote address, Social and Emotional Concerns: Essential for Advocacy. Dr. Peterson will then present two additional sessions: Bullying of and by Gifted Students and Parenting Gifted Kids: A Counselor's Perspective.

Look for Dr. Peterson's recent article, "The Role of Teachers When Gifted Students Experience Negative Life Events," in the next issue of UPDATE, PAGE's quarterly newsletter.

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Karen Rogers

Dr. Karen Rogers is Professor of Gifted Studies at The University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. She began teaching gifted children in 1967 and has been involved with them ever since, receiving two Master’s degrees in gifted education and a doctorate in Gifted Curriculum and Instructional Systems. Dr. Rogers spent three years as Director of Research for GERRIC at the University of New South Wales. She has served on the Board of Directors for NAGC and is a Past President of The Council for Exceptional Children. Dr. Rogers is on the editorial boards of most of the major journals in the field, including Journal for Advanced Academics, Roeper Review, Gifted Child Quarterly, and Gifted and Talented International. She has written more than 100 journal articles, a similar number of magazine articles, three books (include Re-Forming Gifted Education: Matching the Program to the Child), and 20 book chapters. She also wrote and co-produced a ten-part television series called One Step Ahead. In addition, she has evaluated numerous schools, gifted programs, gifted curricula, and gifted research projects.

Join us on Friday, April 23, 2010, to hear Dr. Rogers's keynote address, An Update on the Latest Research in Gifted Education. You can also hear two additional breakout sessions led by Dr. Rogers on that day: Do Australians Do It Better? An Outsider's Perspective of Education "Down Under" and Teachers Who Make a Difference in Gifted Children's Lives. Then, join an interactive panel of Dr. Rogers along with Dr. Ann Lupkowski Shoplik of C-MITES and Dr. Victoria Damiani of Indiana University of Pennsylvania. These three leaders in the field of gifted education will be on hand to answer your questions.

Take a "sneak peek" at Dr. Rogers's session Teachers Who Make a Difference in Gifted Children's Lives by accessing a PowerPoint of that presentation at www.scgifted.org/Keynote.ppt. (Note: After clicking this link, you may need to manually change the URL so that the "K" in keynote is capitalized in order to access this presentation.)

Featured Speaker: Dr. Mary Slade

Dr. Mary Slade is an Associate Professor in the Department of Exceptional Education at James Madison University. She received her B.S. in Elementary Education with an emphasis in secondary English from Longwood College, and her Master’s and Doctorate from the University of Virginia. Dr. Slade has taught in higher education for 20 years and currently serves primarily as an instructor in the area of gifted education. Previously she taught in elementary, middle, and high schools as a fourth-grade, gifted education, and English teacher. She is a member of the Board of Directors of NAGC, and won the Early Leader Award from that organization in 1997. Over the past 15 years Dr. Slade has presented over 200 in-service sessions to educators in pre-K-12 education, and has written more than 175 professional papers, several articles, book chapters, and reports as well as three books. She is also one of the editors of Aiming for Excellence: Annotations to the NAGC PK-12 Gifted Program Standards.

Join us on Thursday, April 22, 2010, for Dr. Slade's full-day session Best Practices for Meeting the Needs of All Gifted Learners.

Visit http://www.softconference.com/nagc/sessionDetail.asp?SID=178291 to hear Dr. Slade's recent webinar entitled Classroom Indicators of Giftedness. The session is free for members of NAGC.