Open Office in America's Public Schools
A few weeks ago, my little brother (7th grade) interviewed both the Superintendent and Technology Coordinator for his public school district for the Digital Natives Project. Both interviewees indicate that the bulk of the district's effort regarding technology is in budget allocation. The Superintendent's focus is on bond issues for new computers while the Technology Coordinator focuses on affordable computer maintenance.
My brother tells me that the computers in his middle school run use the Microsoft Office Suite. One way to both free up some of a school district's technology budget while at the same time introducing students to the Internet's open culture of collaborative innovation is to encourage America's public school administrators to use the Open Office software suite into their schools' computers.
According to the Open Office website, "OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose."
I have been using Open Office for a little over six months and can attest to the software's quality. While I am unsure of what the school district pays (if anything) for using the Microsoft Office Suite, I find two additional and invaluable benefits of using Open Office over Microsoft's product. Both have to do with the Open Office support page. The first is that the Open Office community has been timely and expedient in answering any questions about or solving any problems I've had with the software. This will save technology coordinators and faculty time and effort should a problem arise with the software. The second is that by posing questions to the Open Office community, faculty, administrators, and students alike are participating in the collaborative, social framework that makes the Internet such a powerful tool for personal & community development.
To wit--
Adopting the Open Office software suite in America's public schools would allow for the reallocation of both district technology budgeting and effort while helping to facilitate online collaboration.
Comments
Schools and colleges of USA has surpassed all over world's schools and colleges in science and technology. The very important thing is even preponderance of girls in such sectors is praiseworthy step. This can be seen in Chrysalis School Montana which is designed only for girls to make them capable of handling any sort of work regarding science and technology.
Pablo, on the anniversary of this post I would like to suggest how to pursue this idea of Open Office in public schools.
Our household does not own a version of MS Office. I've been successful in using Open Office for over five years. It has been a struggle to keep my wife and six grade son's document requirements satisfied with Open Office. My son recent classwork demands recently required a presentation where he ran into MS compatibility issues. His middle school runs MS Office 2003 on a majority of machines, with 2007 on a select few. In his first project using OO Presentation, my son saved the file MS PP 97/2000/XP format. The file failed to open at his school.
Pablo, as you can see we have a similar desire and dilemma. I would like to attack this problem through collaborative problem solving. The Do Good Gauge provides the functionality to build upon in facilitating this effort.
I suggest developing a series of journalist quality essays. The Do Good Gauge web site provides a collaborative process of coaching, refinement, publication, and public feedback for developing these essays.
The series of essays would include but not be limited to
1) Overview of the problem
2) Testimonials, corporate or public use of Open Office
a) User Feedback
b) Cost / Benefit Analysis
3) Explanation of the Public School infrastructure
a) The Change Management Process
b) Building relationships and influence in the system
c) Explanation of existing network procedures
d) How the school utilizes technology
4) Facilitating the Collaborative Effort
a) Identify functionality available in the DGG.
b) Identify required functionality in the DGG.
i) Immediate development
ii) Secondary phase development
c) Working around the lack of existing functionality
Please contact me if you are interested in building a journalistic quality paper on your subject using public collaboration.
The Do Good Gauge
http://www.dogoodgauge.org
silence@dogoodgauge.org
NOTE: I'm not sure how this got posted in both Innovation and Openness. I meant to post it only in Innovation. Sorry about that.
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