Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Re: Vista & Office 2007 on new student laptops

I always ask this question when this kind of thing comes up. "Which
children on the scholarship list do not get to come to our school so
we can send money to the richest man in the world? (Bill Gates)" You
should see the looks on peoples faces when I ask it. At times I have
resorted to taking the scholarship wait list into the meeting and
asking those pushing for the latest version of Office to select the
children that will not be able to attend by name.

We use OpenOffice and Google Docs and save our money for better use.

Greg
On Jan 30, 2008, at 5:00 PM, Norman Maynard wrote:

> I would echo the opinions that the move to Office 07 would be
> easier than
> the move to Vista; however, I would offer that perhaps a better move
> would
> be away from proprietary suites altogether. I absolutely do not mean
> to
> start any kind of OS-type flame war, etc., but the future, it seems
> to me,
> is in open-source and more so, web-based apps. Why not save money
> and move
> kids from Office 2003 to Google Docs, or Zoho, or Buzzword, which
> kids seem
> to really like? We've moved to OpenOffice, and though there has been
> some
> difficulties, they've been pretty minor.
>
> Bottom line, it seems to me that as educators we ought to be pushing
> collaborative models whcih invite learning and user involvement over
> proprietary, for-profit models. Add to that Office's troubling .docx
> format,
> and I see no reason for us to spend valuable resources on overpriced,
> overpowered, non-cooperative software.
>
> My $0.02
>
> Norman Maynard
> Principal, Upper School
> Thornton Friends School
> 13925 New Hampshire Ave.
> Silver Spring, MD
> 301.384.0320
>
> On Jan 30, 2008 5:05 PM, Karen Douse <douse@harpethhall.org> wrote:
>
>> A forum for independent school educators <ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU> on
>> Wednesday, January 30, 2008 at 11:53 AM -0600 wrote:
>>> Would you stay with XP or go to Vista this summer?
>>
>> We plan to stay with XP - too many negative reports about Vista. XP
>> works
>> great and we don't see any advantage to changing right now.
>>>
>>> Would you stay with Office 2003 or move to Office 2007 this year?
>> We moved to Office 2007 for everyone on our campus last fall. We
>> did some
>> preview sessions in the spring and offered lots of training time
>> before
>> school started. The transition went as well as any of us could have
>> expected. The students learned it easily
>> and immediately, and most faculty members picked up the differences
>> very
>> quickly. I wouldn't hesitate on this as long as you prepare
>> everyone in
>> advance to expect the change.
>>
>> Karen
>>
>> Karen Douse
>> Director of Library and Information Services
>> Ann Scott Carell Library
>> Harpeth Hall School
>> 615-346-0116
>> douse@harpethhall.org
>>
>>
>> [ For info on ISED-L see http://www.gds.org/ISED-L ]
>> Submissions to ISED-L are released under a creative commons,
>> attribution,
>> non-commercial, share-alike license.
>>
>
> [ For info on ISED-L see http://www.gds.org/ISED-L ]
> Submissions to ISED-L are released under a creative commons,
> attribution, non-commercial, share-alike license.

[ For info on ISED-L see http://www.gds.org/ISED-L ]
Submissions to ISED-L are released under a creative commons, attribution, non-commercial, share-alike license.