It is Tuesday morning and I am taking a few minutes to write this before the keynote. Yesterday was great, I met so many great people. The sessions are full so quickly that it was really hard to get into the ones I wanted, so I went to the playgrounds for Second Life and Open Source. They were great, I really enjoyed hearing how SL is being used by high school and university people and learned a little bit about navigating and using the world. It was so very cool!!!

I talked to a few people from Indiana where they are actually using Open Source in a big way and that was also awesome. I got several people's cards so we have a few resources as we explore this. I did find that most of them are using Open Office as their primary productivity software and there is a new version I am planning on downloading so I can get to know it. There is a conference for Open Source in September in Indiana that would be good to go to!

I then explored the vendors, saw the Power School interface for teachers and parents. It has changed a good deal since we first looked at it and it was a really great upgrade. I can see teachers being able to make the shift from eClass to Power Teacher. The parent portal was a really nice interface also.

I looked at a interactive white board solution that I liked a great deal. Of course there was a lot of flash and dazzle that made it very cool. But if you had to go that direction it was an inexpensive alternative. I also looked at BrainPop Jr. very interactive and easy to use. With a projector and an interactive white board it would be a really good tool for primary grades. We can't buy everything but this was really nice.

I also saw people from Library of Congress, I have seen the site and looked at it but I did not realize everything you could so. They have local universities involved in teaching schools how to use the LOC and primary source documents. DePaul University is one and they will come out for free and do training for your teachers. This is definitely something that our Social Studies people need to look at. They do quite a bit and have curriculum materials already available on their site. I did get a CD to help demonstrate some of this.

Okay, enough for now, there was so much going on and so much to see it is really hard to express it all.