This past week I had the opportunity to travel to San Diego to attend and present at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference. Tom Hoffman and I presented a short talk entitled, From the Classroom: Remixing Wikis with Rendezvous, Web Services and SchoolTool. Chris Jablonski of ZD-Net has a nice summary of our talk. Tom did a great job introducing SchoolTool, the open source student information system, to the audience and pointed them to the just released SchoolBell, the stand alone calendar component of SchoolTool. Over spring break, I plan to install SchoolBell to run a web based calendar for scheduling resources (computer lab, gym, cafeteria...) at Lewis Elementary.

While I won't be able to run SchoolTool as our student information system, I am very happy to see it being developed and supported. I am looking forward to the day when I can point people to a school in the developing world that is keeping track of student information using SchoolTool, and point out how they are doing so using a tool that is customizable and extendable and is free... Take that A.L.L. ...