On Thursday afternoon of the conference I sat in on the session by Lindsay McFillin titled “Grant Writing for Beginners! Opportunities and Tips”. Ms. McFillin lead a great and frank discussion of the world of grants. From the perspective of a grant award team member, Ms. McFillin gave us the realities of the grant decision process. Such as if you do not follow a simple requirement such as summary word count, you will likely be discarded in the first round. To more advanced tips such as sending notes of thanks even if you are not chosen.

For all those who missed the session, fear not her PowerPoint presentation can be found here. It is titled Grant Writing Seminar. This page also has other wonderfully free materials.

Here organization’s website, www.digitalwish.org, offers a 2 for 1 grant to add an Ultra Flip to their classroom.

I tried at this conference to take a wide variety of different workshops and round tables. The open source sessions were top notch and my hats are off to the presenters. They focused on the benefits of open source software, but also was frank about the realities of open source software.

I was extremely excited to see the Linux desktop in use. In the open source lab I spent a good time looking at all of the educational software availablein the Linux KDE environment.

That night I was trying to figure out how I could get those applications on my laptop with out installing Linux. I then came across a great project from kde.org called KDE on Windows. You download a small install program and then finish the install from a mirror in the Internet. I have not dug in to how they accomplish it but I can describe the results. The program created a new program group in my start menu with all of the KDE programs I chose to install. When I click on one of these applications, Windows launches the application like it was a native Windows application. It is an excellent way to look at these programs right away on existing equipment and software.

KDE on Windows can be found here.

On Tuesday night, before the first conference networking event, I was sitting in the lobby of my hotel. I started up a conversation with a gentleman that was also staying at this hotel. I open the conversation by asking him if he was here for the T+L conference. Little did I know that there were at least 3 conferences running at the same time. As we talked I discovered this man was an executive for a major cable provider.  His responsibility was the technical side of his cable company.

We discussed operations, dilemmas of scale, economics of distribution and also video delivery over IP. I mentioned in the discussion that I wanted to start supplying my districts video assets over the network. He gave me a contact of a company that are developing technologies in that area. He even gave me permission to drop his name when I contact the company. Even though we are here to network among each other you will never know who you will meet when you attend NSBA T+L