I am pretty excited to be speaking at this event, much more than most events I speak at. This excerpt from my book might help explain:
I started my Internet career as a teacher and the technology coordinator for a small school in Vermont almost 10 years ago. One of the things I was responsible for, of course, was the school website. When I think of the time and effort that could have been saved had a CMS such as Joomla been available back then, it makes me realize how lucky schools are today. I wonder how many realize that such an astonishingly powerful tool to build a website is available virtually for free.
The school I started at was Fairlee Elementary in Fairlee, Vermont. It grew to become part of the Rivendell School District, America’s first interstate K12 school district, for which I served as the first Technology Coordinator and founding Design Team member.
So I seem to have come full circle, from teaching teachers about technology (not having much awareness of open source), to the business world, working with open source, and then now back to an open source conference in the town where it all started.
Not only that, but the new Rivendell District Website now uses Joomla!
You can download a free sample of How to Create a School Website with Joomla here at compassdesigns.net.
Or checkout the turnkey School Joomla website package at Simplweb.
Register for FOSSVT 2009 here. (sold out!)