Blog

December 28, 2011
Prior to my "Schoolyard" role, I worked in a profession dependent on building strong client/donor relationships. With the move to a tech-focused industry, I assumed project focus would hover primarily on web capabilities, with human interactions playing a secondary or supporting role.  Thankfully I had miscalculated - and not only because my fluency in geek only goes so far (I write that with utter respect for those with a facility for the language. Listen, I married a web developer!).  
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December 23, 2011
The holiday break is fast approaching here at Schoolyard! We've included a list of our holiday plans just so you know what we're up to...
Best wishes for a happy holiday!!
 
What are you doing over the holiday break?
 
Mark Bistline, President:Time with family pressuring Mommy regarding the need for a dog in the home. Playing late night Euchre with my wife and & oldest child, tending to Schoolyard tasks, and re-wiring the lights on the Morris Minor.
 
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April 08, 2011

We're really excited about this talk, and think it's just what schools need to hear. We're also posting the slides now, so please feel free to download, share and comment.

From the conference site:

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March 25, 2011

Designers subscribe to various philosophies, especially in determining the magic number of design options for a client.  Here at Schoolyard, we are proponents of the iterative design solution.  A purposeful discovery process leads to a comprehensively thought-out design that best speaks to the identified needs of the client.  This generally results in a singular design, but we do not dismiss those occasions when the project dictates more than one persuasive solution.

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March 14, 2011

Here at Schoolyard, we pride ourselves as being leaders in open source website design for the independent school market.  With the understanding that this is our primary endeavor,and Drupal our beloved platform, we also don't shy away from utilizing the breadth of our professional capabilities to best serve our clients' needs and the project at hand.  Case in point,the High Meadows School in Roswell, Georgia. Our dialogue with High Meadows began at the CASE-NAIS conference in Chicago last January.

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February 20, 2011

When we returned to the independent school web market a year ago this week, for NAIS AC10 in San Francisco, we called ourselves "Newschoolyard." The truth is we never actually left, we just stepped aside for a while. We had always provided support to our old proprietary code-based clients (in fact we still support exactly one school still running our old system). In introducing our new system--the first and still the only open source web CMS for independent schools--we wanted to differentiate ourselves from "old" expensive proprietary Schoolyard.

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January 03, 2011

Brendan Schneider from Sewickly Academy retweeted a post recently stating that blog traffic is increased when the title refers to a numerical list--we'll see about that.

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November 01, 2010

I attended the PEJE (Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education) conference in Baltimore last week--a fascinating group of schools and people unknown to us prior to this event. Special thanks to Mordechai Rosenstein, a Judaic artist upon whom we bestow the title of "favorite next-booth neighbor in fifteen years of independent school conference exhibits."

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October 23, 2010

We submitted a proposal this week to develop a platform for online collaboration among teachers in a consortium of 50 schools. It's a unique project for us as it's exclusively about teaching and learning, without the branding, marketing and messaging components that are central to most of our work.

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September 15, 2010

In 1996 I moderated a panel discussion on technology in education during the centennial celebration at St. George's School in Rhode Island, where at the time I chaired the Art Department. The panel had some heft to it: John Scully was the keynote speaker, flanked by some of the best minds in educational technology, Frank Moretti among them. Dr.

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