Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Re: Vista & Office 2007 on new student laptops

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
>
>
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>

[ 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.