[K12OSN] Microsoft Office on K12 LTSP

[Doug Simpson]

But where is the disadvantage when you produce "well educated students" 
who are fully capable of adapting to different technologies instead of 
being "locked in" to the M$ way of doing things?  Well educated students 
can sit down in front of Excel, OOCalc, Quattro Pro, Lotus and be 
able to do what they want.  Limited educated students are taught M$ and 
are unable to do what they want in anything else. . .

JMHO - YMMV

Doug Simpson
Technology Specialist
DeQueen Public Schools
DeQueen, AR 71832
simpsond at leopards.k12.ar.us
Tux for President!

On Mon, 22 Aug 2005, george kocke wrote:

> 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
> 
> 
> ______________________________________________________________________
> This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System.
> For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email 
> ______________________________________________________________________
> 
> _______________________________________________
> K12OSN mailing list
> K12OSN at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/k12osn
> For more info see <http://www.k12os.org>
>