Thing 18

I explored the Open Office documents and was surprised at how similar they are to the Microsoft counterparts. I was pleased to see the Writer (Word program) and Impress (PowerPoint program) were very similar to the ones I am so familiar with. The Impress program seemed to be lacking only in the colored templates available at start up. They do however offer a smiley face in their graphics :-) The database program called Base sets up differently from Access, but looks to be much friendlier if you are actually going to create any queries. The Excel type program is called Calc. There are also more programs available than the standard Microsoft suite, including a drawing and a math program that math teachers would have to love for creating practice sheets and tests. In the suite on our teacher laptops, I did not see a program similar to Publisher and nothing for email.

I certainly appreciate the cost savings of using the Open Office documents, but I wonder if our students would be ahead of the game using these programs or behind by not using the industry standard.

I have had one previous experience with Google docs. We tried to create our district Power to Learn grant using that system, but we encountered a number of glitches getting everyone logged in or being able to access the document when needed. Some of the glitches appeared to be district based and some with Google. As the system is more and more used I'm hoping any bugs in the program will be worked out and it will be the seamless group editing tool that it can be. Just to be fair, I tried to log into the grant document again today and had absolutely no problems getting in or editing. Hopefully my previous problems were not the norm for this service.