Excited and grateful

I’ve been very busy this week and haven’t had time to do much writing. I’m going to be presenting on open source software opportunities in K-12 education at the NYSCATE conference in Rochester, New York next month and I’ve been collaborating with a couple of peers who will be co-presenting with me. I’m very excited. This is a first opportunity of this kind that I’ve had to present to a statewide gathering of educators. In preparing for the presentation I called the New York State Dell Computer representative and asked if he’d be kind enough to send some flyers on Dell’s Ubuntu desktops and laptops. He graciously agreed to do that. Then I called another vendor in Buffalo, Great Lakes Electronics Distributing, Co. and asked if they could provide some product literature also since I’ve used a number of their machines in Linux and open source projects too, including our new Drupal server. Our sales representative, Mr. Geoff Zander, really blew me away by proposing that Great Lakes donate a PC that could be loaded with Ubuntu or some other Linux OS and raffled to benefit the conference. I’m a businessman and I know his company can write that off, but it is nonetheless a great gift and I appreciate their generosity. I hope that this added incentive brings more people to our presentation and that more educators will consider the advantages of open source software.

About Don Watkins

I'm a FOSS advocate, writer, educator, Python coder, Linux user, US Navy Veteran, Secular Franciscan, husband,father and grandfather. I blog about my life and experiences that give it meaning.

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2 Responses to Excited and grateful

Brian says:

November 1, 2007 at 2:54 pm

Don, this is great! I use Ubuntu and am helping with the NYSCATE conference. We are using a variety of tools to share information about the conference, such as Twitter.com. I encourage you to create an account if you have not already and follow our updates. Once NYSCATE follows you, attendees will be able to see your updates. One great use of this is to use Twitter to promote your raffle of the PC with Linux! This is great. If you have any questions, in regards to NYSCATE, please don’t hesitate.

Don says:

November 1, 2007 at 4:48 pm

Thanks for all the information. I did as you suggested, joined Twitter and followed NYSCATE. I got the PC from Great Lakes yesterday and today I’ve installed Ubuntu 7.10 on it and I’ve already installed Virtual Box on it and am in the process of installing Fedora Core 7 in a VM. We (Frank, Chris, and I) will virtualize PCLinuxOS, and some other Linices. Frank is going to present on LAMP and Chris is going to present his experience with using open source application in the classroom and the classroom/home learning environment facilitated by the use of open source software. I’m going to talk about my/our experience with a Linux terminal server at my own district and how we are using thin clients on our network to support instruction. 🙂 Don