More than 150 language educators met in cyberspace for the first webinar on language assessment at the end of February. Conducted as a joint project by CALPER and the Language Acquisition Resource Center (LARC) at San Diego State University, the webinar series brings presentations and training sessions directly to the computers of teachers. Educators from 28 states across the U.S. and from eleven countries around the world - Canada, Ireland, the UK, Germany, Italy, Turkey, Iran, El Salvador, Mexico, Japan, and Australia - connected via the Internet. The February webinar was held by Matthew E. Poehner, director of CALPER's Dynamic Assessment project.

LARC, who provides the technology and the technology expertise for the series, archived the full webinar. If you missed it and want to listen to the presentation, go directly to LARC's Archive Page or look at CALPER's Webinar Page first.

Save the date for our second webinar, which will be held May 5, 2011 at 3:30
p.m. EST (12:30 p.m. Pacific). The speaker is Meg Malone, Senior Testing Associate at the Center for Applied Linguistics and Co-director of the National Capital Language Resource Center (NCLRC). Dr. Malone will talk about "Performance Assessment".

Watch for more specific announcement on our websites and mark your calendar!

On April 2 & 3 we will be in Baltimore - this year's venue of the Northeast Conference. We will hold a session on Saturday at 3:30 p.m in the Atlantic room of the conference hotel and exhibit materials and resources at booth #1413.

On April 29 we will be at the annual Spring Methodology Conference of the Indiana University of PA, were we will also hold a session and exhibit materials.

At both conferences, colleagues who come to the booth have the chance to win a stipend for a summer workshop in the amount of the registration fee. We hope we are going to meet many of you!

For the sixth year now, we are going to hold our annual open house at the last day of the Spring semester. On Friday, April 29 CALPER will showcase materials and graduating students and awardees from the Department of Applied Linguistics will present their dissertation and thesis projects. Our open house will take place in the Learning Center in Sparks from 11:30 a.m. - 1:00 p. m. Light refreshments will be served. Stop by the Learning Center for a chat and to take a look at our projects.