The 6th annual TEDx Dayton event has come and gone.  The theme for this year’s program was “Shift”.

I was so honored to be included as a speaker for this year’s program. My talk was about lessons I have learned from my daughter, Amelia.  Amelia just turned 9 years old, and was diagnosed with Autism just before her third birthday.

I have told versions of this story in other formats – as a five-minute Ignite session at the Ohio Educational Technology Conference a few years ago, in an article that was published in a booklet called “Sharing Hope”, and as a brief keynote address to special education and school improvement consultants in Ohio.  But, the presentation was never as “polished” as it needed to be for TEDx Dayton.

The process of breaking my thoughts down to their bare essence, and then building back up to a connected and meaningful series of thoughts, was one of the hardest things I have ever done professionally.  I am deeply grateful for all of the support that the TEDx Dayton organizers offered me to help get my talk to that point – after all, it will soon be available on the Internet for the world to see. (Yikes!)

It takes several weeks for the recordings to be finalized and posted among the videos on the TEDx site.  But you can bet that once it is there, I’ll happily share Amelia’s story with anyone who would like to listen!