Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Open Office vs Microsoft Word
I am incredibly frustrated with my school's decision to make keyboarding students use Open Office, a free word processing program, rather than provide our small lab with Microsoft's Word program. How many companies, schools, and other institutions use Open Office? I'm willing to be more schools and companies use Word. Sure, Open Office is free, but it is also unreliable and rarely used in the "real world." When students leave our middle school for the high school, they will be ill-prepared for the business department's computer classes because they will not have had necessary exposure to the Microsoft programs used by the department. To top it off, THREE other computer labs around the school that are primarily used for testing - not keyboarding class - have Microsoft Office programs. Makes sense, right?
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As we discussed in our methods class, this seems crazy to me. I have never heard of a school not having any Microsoft Programs. I don't know how similar open office is to microsoft word, but this seems to a pointless as you said because you are not properly preparing the students. Good luck with your classes. Go Zags haha
ReplyDeleteThat is pretty weird. Is it a budget issue? Just blame it on the economy.
ReplyDelete- Bill Waldrop
A budget issue sounds about right...seems like schools always have them regardless of what the economy is doing!
ReplyDeleteWhy do you want to funnel your money to The Man? Schools that run Microsoft programs are feeding the beast's future consumers.
ReplyDeleteThat seems like the schools are doing a disservice to their students. Pretty much the whole world uses Word products and the kids themselves probably use it at home. Why wouldn't the schools teach them the same programs that they will be using in the future?
ReplyDeleteI use Open Office on all my computers. Love it! I agree with Zach- break the monopoly- use open source code applications!
ReplyDelete