the Digital Town Hall

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.