Getting Ready—Establishing Professional Contacts and Expanding Resources

So far it has been challenging making contact with early childhood professionals outside of the United States. As a starting point, I did access the Global Alliance Page through the NAEYC at http://www.naeyc.org/resources/partnership/globalalliance#australia. However, I am yet to make successful contact. My next strategy is to communicate with some of my international friends via Facebook and other social networking websites to see if these individuals can assist me in the process of establishing a professional relationship with early childhood professionals in their countries. If this strategy proves to be unsuccessful, I will need to sadly select the alternative to this assignment.

Several steps were taken in order to locate the early childhood organization for part two of the blog assignment. The first step was to use the Google search engine to locate a link page for all of the early childhood organizations located within North America. This link pages was located at http://www.naeyc.org/links. I then read through the list of the links and selected the organizations that were of interest to me and my educational and professional goals. Once these organizations were selected and narrowed down the content of their websites were analyzed to ensure credibility.  Finally, the organization Learning Disabilities Association of America was selected. Their website can be located at http://www.ldanatl.org/.  This organization was selected because learning disabilities and autism are an interest of mine and are extremely applicable to my professional and educational career.

Helpful tips in locating an organization:

1. Determine your interests or professional pursuits.
2. Locate a resource such as http://www.naeyc.org/links that provides a list of credible organizations.
3. Research each website of each organization of interest to ensure it is credible and reputable.