[K12OSN] Microsoft Office on K12 LTSP

[george kocke]

On Mon, 2005-08-22 at 08:53, rmcdaniel at indata.us wrote:
 
> I explained to the powers to be that we are supposed to be teaching
> kids how to use spreadsheets, word processors,  data base
> applications, and presentation programs.  Not how to use MS Office. 
> If a student goes to work for a law firm, they will be using
> WordPerfect.

Yes, but this is a difficult concept for people who insist upon training
with certain versions of certain products in order to produce "well
educated" students.

We're now beginning our 4th year of using K12LTSP & OpenOffice, but I
almost didn't make it to the 2nd year because of the Microsoft Office
issue. There were people who simply didn't like the different
arrangement of menus and icons from Office 97 and those who thought that
our students (we go up to 8th grade) would be at a disadvantage when
they got to high school.

I used two arguments to win these people over. The first was more money
in their pockets due to the vast sums we were saving. The second was to
show them how similar all of the "office" products have been for the
last 20 something years and showed them a 1986 version of Microsoft
Works on a Mac SE.

-- 
george kocke <webmaster at vol.org>
http://www.vol.org


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