Presenters+&+Proposals

=Keynotes:=



Kevin Honeycutt, Technology Integration Specialist
I spent 13 years teaching art in the classroom and working with kids to help them plan for the future. A few years ago, I left the classroom for a change at ESSDACK, and educational service center that allows me to research and develop programs that can help educators and learners.

This is an exciting time to be alive and my passion is to help teachers get comfortable with the new technology tools their kids need for success in the future. I travel everywhere trying to open new doors and develop new "pockets of possibility." One of my other passions is educating kids, parents, and teachers on the issues of bullying, cyber-bullying, and online safety. Today's parents are up against it with all of the new realities in kids' worlds. I have the honor of having a career that permits me the time to research online issues and to share what I learn with people. There was no internet when I was a kid, and no one taught me how to be and act online. This means that as a father, I have a lot to learn and to keep learning. I know there are other adults who are missing the skills necessary to guide their kids online and kids don't always know the real implication of their online behavior.



Ann Robinson, Professor of Gifted and Talented Education
Ann Robinson is Professor of Education and founding Director of the Center for Gifted Education at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She is a former editor of the Gifted Child Quarterly, serves on the Board of Directors for the National Association for Gifted Children as the Vice President and received the Early Leader, the Early Scholar, and the Distinguished Service Awards from the Association. In 2004, she and co-author Sidney Moon received the Gifted Child Quarterly Paper Year Award for a qualitative study, “The National Study of State and Local Advocacy in Gifted Education.” With Shore, Cornell and Ward, Ann co-authored __Recommended Practices in Gifted Education: A Critical Analysis__ which was identified as one of the 50 most influential works in Gifted Education by the Research and Evaluation Division of the National Association for Gifted Children. She was a charter board member of the Special Interest Group on Giftedness and Talent of the American Educational Research Association. In 2000, Ann was recognized as the Purdue University Alumna of Distinction for the College of Education. Her own institution honored her with the University Award of Faculty Excellence in Research in 1999 and the University of Award for Public Service in 2001. Ann is the President of the Arkansans for Gifted and Talented Education, the Immediate Past President of the Arkansas Association of Gifted Education Administrators, and is active in advocacy at the state and national levels. She has held visiting appointments at Cambridge University, at Brunel University near London and at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. As a former classroom teacher, Ann is interested in curriculum, assessment and instruction for high ability learners, the role of the talented child in cooperative learning groups, the development and evaluation of teacher preparation and professional development programs, program evaluation in gifted education, and research-based best practices for high ability learners. In 2006, her text, __Best Practices in Gifted Education: An Evidence-based Guide__ was published with co-authors Bruce Shore and Donna Enersen. As a service publication of the National Association for Gifted Children, the guide summarizes 29 practices with research support for use with high ability learners. Over half of them are instructional and curricular practices and include content specific pedagogy in reading, language arts, history, inquiry-based science, mathematics, the arts, and career education. Ann is an enthusiastic reader of biographies, recommends them as a strategy for differentiating the curriculum for high ability learners, and has designed a series of instructional guides for classroom teachers keyed to trade book biographies. The guides focus on instructional strategies in reading, language arts, and social studies to promote higher level thinking, talent development, and interest-based investigations.