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Sessions | Presenters | Exhibitors | Register

Attend the Texas Nonprofit Summit to learn nonprofit management best practices, explore innovative trends and emerging opportunities for collaboration, share ideas and resource through affinity group gatherings and more. Get a sneak peek at some conference sessions!

After August 25, an additional $20 fee will be added to the registration fee.

Keynote Speakers
		Kathy LeMay Kathy LeMay is the founder, president and CEO of Raising Change, which helps organizations raise capital to advance social change agendas and individuals create Generosity Plans to help change the world. READ MORE
		Beth Kanter Beth is the author of Beth’s Blog (http://www.bethkanter.org), one of the longest running and most popular blogs for nonprofits and co-author of the highly acclaimed book, The Networked Nonprofit, published by J. Wiley in 2010. READ MORE

Hotel Reservation Details

The 2011 Texas Nonprofit Summit will be held at AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center. Summit participants get a special room rate of $169 per night. To reserve your room, call the AT&T Conference Center directly at 877-744-8822 or 512-404-3600 and let them know you’re attending the Texas Nonprofit Summit. Reservations can also be made at meetattexas.com by accessing the reservations tab and entering dates, contact info as well as the group code: GREENL0911.

Exhibit, Sponsor or Purchase an Ad

Sponsor the 2011 Texas Nonprofit Summit! A variety of levels and benefits are available. Contact Amy Silvey at 512.477.5955 x248 with questions or for more information.

Exhibit at the 2011 Texas Nonprofit Summit. Please review the exhibitor packet and complete the exhibitor registration form. Contact Julie Macalik at 512.477.5955 x247 with questions.

Purchase a full-color ad in the 2011 Texas Nonprofit Summit program. Please review the ad specifications and contact Julie Macalik at 512.477.5955 x247 with questions or to purchase an ad.

Photos from the 2010 Texas Nonprofit Summit

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

:: via Scobleizer – Today I took a brief break from my family vacation to visit Vizio’s and Oakley’s headquarters down in Southern California with my friends Marc Ostrick and Sam Levin to get up to date on the latest 3D technologies from both companies. But while there Vizio pulled out their new Tablet and it shocked me what I thought of it (I’ve hated the Android tablets so far, when compared to iPad 2).

Mark Ostrick, of eGuiders, shot this video (you should follow his YouTube channel). Sam Levin does a cool gadget podcast for app freaks at AppMinute.

I finally had someone explain to me why Android will gain huge marketshare this year in the large-screen tablet wars (aka where iPad is dominant). It took USA’s #1 TV manufacturer, Vizio, to do it. Why didn’t Google have them on stage to show this off a few weeks back at Google IO?

Anyway, here it is: a $350 capable tablet is coming. Coming in July, they told me (and I believe them, they don’t want to piss off the retail chain in the United States because they are #1 in large screen TVs).

Why is this huge? Because it doesn’t compete with iPad. At least not head on.

“What is Scoble smoking,” you are probably asking yourself.

Well, see, people who will buy an iPad will buy an iPad and won’t buy anything else. Count me in that group. I don’t care if Larry Page gave me $10,000 I’m not switching off of an iPad. At least not this year.

But, there are a whole range of uses that don’t need an iPad, but need a good tablet.

For instance, let’s say you are outfitting a school with tablets and all you need is a good web browser at a very low cost? Vizio wins here. Apple doesn’t.

Or, say you are a restaurant and need to put a tablet at every table with a menu on it? Vizio wins here. Apple doesn’t.

Or, like we just saw at Oakley’s headquarters, let’s say you are building a custom retail experience where you can order custom sunglasses. Are you going to spend $500 on an iPad when a $350 one from Vizio will do? No way. Vizio wins. Apple doesn’t.

Get it? This is how Android will take over the marketshare battle in tablets. There are more of these uses than the ones people use iPads for. After all, how many schools need tablets? A whole lot. How many custom retail establishments need tablets? A whole lot. How many manufacturing machines need tablets built into them? A whole lot.

Thanks to this single tablet I can now see how Android is going to get the market share numbers it needs to get developers excited.

But don’t call it an iPad competitor, OK? At least not until there are a ton of great tablet-based apps, which there aren’t today.

Some more things I saw at Vizio today?

1. A look at latest 3DTVs (this is the same one they loaned me for my home studio to develop 3D content on and test out).
2. A look at new 21:9 aspect-ratio TV designed for movie buffs.

Anyway, just a brief break from my vacation, be back on Monday with more tech stuff.

–>

From the Editor

Duncan’s Plan B

Anne Wujcik — Friday, June 17, 2011

It looks like the really big news this week has been Education Secretary Duncan’s talk about his “Plan B” for the ESEA reauthorization. Frustrated by the slow pace of Congressional action on the ESEA, Secretary Duncan has begun talking about using his waiver power to address some of the problems with the current No Child Left Behind legislation. Earlier he had tried to motivate Congressional action by pointing out that without reauthorization large numbers of American schools would soon be labeled as failing. That approach failed to motivate Congress, so the Secretary is taking a new tack, talking about granting states relief from some aspects of the law in return for what he has called “commitments to key reforms.”

NCLB calls for all students to be 100% proficient in math and reading by 2014. Early in the days of NCLB, the states were required to set annual goals detailing how they would move students toward the 100% goal. Many states back loaded their plans, calling for very small annual changes in the percentage of students deemed proficient in the early stages and much larger changes in the last three or four years leading up to 2014. We are now in those final years and the Secretary has been using his bully pulpit to point out that many states would find it very difficult to achieve the dramatic increases their plans outlined.

The exact effect of the threat to increase the use of waivers and regulatory relief is uncertain. Certainly the initial reactions of the lead education players – Sen. Harkin, Rep. Kline, Rep. Miller – were cool. Congress does not like anyone intruding on their turf – but whether the intrusion causes them to work faster or slower remains to be seen. The Senate is close to having a reauthorization bill ready for consideration. The House is breaking the task into smaller bits. It has passed one bill eliminating funding for 43 programs that it found ineffective or duplicative. Next on their agenda is a bill that would give the schools more flexibility in terms of how they use federal dollars.

The Administration is also interested in giving the schools more flexibility. Among potential changes the Secretary has said he is interested in is giving schools more flexibility in terms of how they can use their Title I money. This might involve a blanket waiver that allows schools to opt out of NCLB’s supplemental educational services or school choice requirements. Increased local flexibility holds great promise and some real peril, as there is the potential for money now tied to specific uses that support the education of our most vulnerable students being directed into other priorities.  

The states are very interested in relief around testing and AYP requirements. One of the complicating factors in all this is that the states and districts are in the process of implementing the Common Core State Standards. In some states the transition to the Common Core will start this fall. At the same time, teachers will have to be sure that they are also covering the existing standards, since students will continue to be tested on the existing standards until the new tests aligned to the CCSS come on line in 2014. 

The commitment to accountability at both the Department of Education and in Congress makes it highly unlikely that current testing requirements would just be suspended for the interim. I happen to think that we wouldn’t loose all that much if we just stopped testing for a while or only test a few grades each year. There seems to be pretty widespread agreement that the tests we are using don’t really tell us very much. If teachers didn’t have to worry about the current tests for a few years, they would have the time and freedom to experiment more widely with the best ways to develop the more complex textual analysis or the mathematical practices the CCSS call for. 

But of course, with more states moving to include student test scores as a part of their teacher evaluation systems, we can’t have an absence of test scores. New York City is working on as many as 16 new standardized tests it wants to use as part of its teacher evaluation process. Last year, as part of its effort to win a Race to the Top Grant, New York passed legislation requiring that 40% of each teacher’s be based on standardized test results or another “rigorous, comparable” measure of student performance. Half of that 40% should be based on the state’s accountability testing program and the other half on local measures. The NYC tests would be built around tasks, which moves them closer to the CCSS assessments currently under development. The whole New York state evaluation plan is in flux, but it does seem to illustrate one possible response to the efforts to tie teacher evaluation to student test scores — more tests.

The problem with trying to reform a system is that everything’s connected.  Pushing down in one place can result in odd bumps rising in another.  That’s one of the advantages of having a real debate around the ultimate shape of the ESEA reauthorization. We need to lay out the options and try to anticipate the consequences of any proposed changes, both intended and unintended. It’s hard to know what the Secretary has in mind — there are no real details right now. And it’s not clear that the states will be as anxious to sign on, given the expectation that they will have to adopt a set of reform measures. All that remains to be played out.  

 

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