New York, NY — January 8, 2008 — The Illinois Online Conference for Teaching and Learning – a global online professional networking and learning event for educators now in its sixth year – announced today that award-winning podcaster “Grammar Girl” will open the conference with a live online keynote address.

The Grammar Girl podcast provides short, friendly tips to improve one’s writing, and is hosted by Mignon Fogarty, the show’s creator and founder of the popular Quick and Dirty Tips series of podcasts. Fogarty will deliver her live, interactive webcast keynote on February 13, 2008, kicking off three days of exciting online collaboration and networking among hundreds of education and training professionals worldwide.

The Illinois Online Conference (IOC) features over 50 presentations and workshops, conducted completely over the Internet February 13-15, 2008. Each year hundreds of educators and trainers from postsecondary and K-12 education and the workforce development arenas converge online to participate in virtual classroom sessions, active discussion forum exchanges, and online poster sessions. Networking events, virtual happy hours, podcasts and blogs mean that participants not only learn from the distinguished presenters, but from each other. And they do it all without the cost and hassle of winter travel to Illinois.

"I receive e-mail messages every week from teachers who are using Grammar Girl in their classrooms, and I'm looking forward to interacting with so many educators during an extended, live, online edition of Grammar Girl at the Illinois Online Conference," said Fogarty.

Grammar Girl was recently voted “Best Education Podcast” in the Podcast Awards, in which over 1.3 million unique people voted.

“I’m an avid listener of Mignon’s podcast,” said Jonathan Finkelstein, Executive Producer of LearningTimes, one of the organizations that produce IOC. “Her fun and utterly digestible approach to instruction is a great model for teachers everywhere, no matter what topics they teach or what technologies they use. Grammar Girl will provide a fitting opening to this year’s event.”

The second and third days of IOC will be marked by other exciting keynotes spanning both virtual and physical learning spaces. Julian Lombardi of Duke University will explore Croquet, an open environment for creating collaborative virtual worlds for learning, while Rachel Gutter, the School Sector Manager of the US Green Building Council, will focus on making our ground-based learning more eco-friendly and sustainable.

Registration for IOC 2008 is open and includes access to an online community, all live keynotes and events, session recordings, materials and online discussions for one year.

For more information and to sign-up visit www.ilonlineconf.org.

About Illinois Online Conference
Now in its sixth year, the Illinois Online Conference for Teaching and Learning connects educators and trainers from around the world in a state-of-the-art conference hosted completely online by the Illinois K-20 education community. The event is sponsored by Lake Land College, Illinois Virtual Campus, Illinois Community Colleges Online (ILCCO), Illinois Online Network (ION), the Illinois State Board of Education, and Illinois Virtual High School. In addition to LearningTimes, this year sponsors also include Grammar Girl and the Quick and Dirty Tips series of podcasts, and Qwaq Forums. The conference will be held February 13-15, 2008. For more information visit www.ilonlineconf.org, write ioc@learningtimes.net.