[K12OSN] Open Office

Christian Einfeldt einfeldt at gmail.com
Thu Jun 7 20:35:59 UTC 2007


On 6/7/07, Derek Jaques <djaques at corbett.k12.or.us> wrote:
>
> Does anyone have any ideas how to open .pub (MS publisher files)  .wps
> (MS works defaut) or .docx (Vista word??)  files?


Have them paste the text into a Google Docs page.  Then require the kids to
invite you (the teacher) to collaborate with them on the documents.  Gives
the parents a chance to collaborate and check their kids work remotely.
More comments in line...

I have a plethora of
> students who have term papers in these formats from home.  If Open
> Office cannot open them, is there another program that will with the
> default K12LTSP distro packages?


 Try using Google Docs and Spreadsheets (GDS).  I am a volunteer for a
public charter middle school in San Francisco.  I am a level one tech
support.  I have a few command line skills, but nothing more.  One day we
experienced killer slowness in using OpenOffice.org (OOo) under K12LTSP.
(We still cannot really figure out why that happened).  Unfortunately, a
science teacher was having our 7th graders do presentations.  Since we were
in a pinch, and we could not figure out how to configure a DNS mail server
such that we could get GDS for the school itself, we used the GDS package
that Google had given to an open source film project I am producing, called
the Digital Tipping Point.

GDS was superior to OOo, because it was possible for the science teacer and
the students' parents to check in on the students' work remotely.  That was
a big big plus.  Also, the kids spontaneously started using the
collaboration functions of GDS to help each other with their work.  It
turned out to be much, much better than OOo.
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