NSBA T+L 2009 Conference
I am sitting here at Denver International Airport using the Internet via bluetooth on my phone. I figured it would be as good a time as any to give an overview of the 2009 T+L conference. Last year we did a couple of workshops and one presentation as kind of a beta test to see if the folks at NSBA wanted to have an open source presence at their annual technology + Leadership conference. This year they gave us our own room and we did about a dozen presentations and two workshops. It was very well received!
We had school board members, superintendents, principals, it directors, it staff, instructional technology folks, teachers and teacher librarians attend our sessions. We covered things like "What is open source" all the way to large scale iimplementations of Linux and the rollout of Zimbra as the district email system. Most of the presentations were on more of an administrative level and didn't really dig into any specific applications.
Board members were really impressed with what they saw and many said that they would be talking with their technology folks. Many it directors had positive things to say and a number of superintendents were very complimentary. What I have found interesting is that over the last 18 months our audience has changed. Now they seem to know what open source is and are looking for answers to specific questions. We even had a superintendent who came to many of the sessions and we found out that he is the only Ubuntu, Linux user in his district. I want to work for him!
I believe that we are on the cusp of an open source revolution in the k12 educational arena. Many said they are looking at open source because of cost savings, but they are also looking for more eficiant ways to spend existing funds. When you use open source you can repurpose those funds to other projects. All in all it was an amazing success and the snowball is going to start rolling down the hill at an ever increasing pace. If you have comments please add them to the post. If you attended the conference and you have anything to say about the open source lab please speak up. Thanks to all that visited us in the lab. See you next year.
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November 2, 2009 - 7:54am
#1
Good work
Randy,
I attended the T+L conference and your open source presentation. You did a nice job and I learned some things......
I read your bio on this site and we have some things in common. First, I used to live near Bainbridge Island. I went to Olympic High School. Second, I too was a music teacher - band, to be more specific. I taught band for 16 years before I found out that I was going to lose my hearing (you probably saw me with interpreters in your open source session). So, I became a librarian and taught some tech classes. I am now Webmaster/Instructional Technology Coordinator for my school district.
I was able to make this move largely because of open source tools. I have set up Joomla powered sites for our schools, and a Moodle powered site for the District. Fun stuff.....
I had a go at phpESP and learned something. phpESP requires the dbase extension, which is not included in PHP 5.3.0 It is available for earlier versions.
At any rate, thanks again. I enjoyed your session.
Best wishes,
Jeff
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November 18, 2009 - 12:28am
#2
Thanks
Hey Jeff, I am glad you enjoyed the conference and that you learned some things. It is also comforting to know that I am not the only band director to leave the ranks and go into tachnology.
I will look into the newest version of phpESP and see what I can do. In the mean time, take a look at the Lime Survey and see if it does what you want. As far as Joomla, how is that working out for you? I started with Joomla because it was easy to get started, but found in the long run I couldn't do the things I needed to do with user access control. I am now a big Drupal fan and with the addition of views and cck, I wouldn't use anything else at this point.
Thanks again. I hope to see you at another conference. Stop by and say hello.
