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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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

At the beginning of 1996 we were the only company making websites for independent schools. We recognized that the web was becoming an important enough communication resource that schools would eventually look to outside sources for help. A lot of other companies eventually arrived at the same conclusion, and of those I'd say that three became truly excellent providers of web communications services to the NAIS community.

It's been three and a half months since we launched Newschoolyard at NAIS, and here's what we've learned thus far:

Newschoolyard is engaged in the Drupal community. I have been in the independent school website business for fifteen years, or 180 months, and this past month has been, by far, the coolest and most mind-boggling of all. Newschoolyard's Platform Architect, Jason Pamental, is headed to San Francisco for DrupalCon next week and my only regret is that I am not going with him. We joined the Drupal education community some months ago, and we are excited to make face-to-face contact with those whose voices we have only heard electronically.

Newschoolyard is pleased to announce two more independent schools have signed-on for our open source web service; Nantucket New School and Soundview Prep. Nantucket New School is a co-educational day school serving students in pre-school through grade eight. Soundview Preparatory School, an independent, coed day school for grades 6 – 12, is located on a 13 acre campus in Yorktown Heights, New York in northern Westchester County.