Thursday, January 31, 2008

Re: Vista & Office 2007 on new student laptops

I have been using a tablet for a couple of years and have not found a huge
degree of difference between XP tablet and Vista. Vista comes with a
handwriting input tray that hovers on the edge of your screen and is ready
for use whenever you pick up the pen; that said, my Toshiba tablet came with
similar OEM software. I have been very frustrated with Vista's "mobility
Center," which is supposed to be a suite of tools for tablets and laptops
but, since my tablet is already *2* years old, it has a lack of support for
some features, and I find connecting to a projector much more cumbersome
than I did in XP.

I've been looking for open-source or web-based alternatives to OneNote
(which is a great program) for some time. As far as I can tell, there are
alternatives in the development stage - something called "Baskets" or
something like that, for use with Linux, and Springnote online (although
that feels like it has a different intention) but neither, as far as i can
tell, come close to the quality of Onenote. Given its usability and lack of
competition though, I would be surprised if one didn't materialize within
the next year or so.

In peace,

*Norman Maynard*
Principal, Upper School
*Thornton Friends School* <http://www.thorntonfriends.org/>
Silver Spring, MD 20904
301.384.0320

On Jan 31, 2008 9:29 AM, Greg Kearney <kearney@tribcsp.com> wrote:

> OpenOffice also fits nicely into our, "you must master three OSs"
> education plan as well.
>
> Greg
> On Jan 31, 2008, at 6:24 AM, Tim Cooper wrote:
>
> > OpenOffice and its mac cousin NeoOffice are amazing alternatives to
> > Microsoft Office 2003/4/7/8 and both can be set to open and save in
> > Word
> > format to be compatible with the MS Office that people have at home
> > (including docx). Why spend the money for an inferior product?
> > OpenOffice is an open source collaboration of business and
> > universities to
> > provide a viable, reliable product for no cost to the public. Doesn't
> > this reflect the values we want to instill in our students? Abiword
> > is
> > also a good open source word processor, but OpenOffice is a true
> > office
> > replacement (it even has its own drawing program).
> >
> > Dump MS Office for OpenOffice.
> >
> > Tim Cooper
> > LREI - Little Red Schoolhouse and Elisabeth Irwin HS
> > 40 Charlton St.
> > New York, NY 10014
> > 212.477.5316 ext 364
> > tcooper@lrei.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.