Slashdot Mirror
School District To Parents — Buy Office 2007
WS Nick writes "Batavia school district in Illinois is recommending that parents of high school students upgrade their home computers to Microsoft Office 2007. Why not use one of the free alternatives and relieve parents of some of the financial burden they face to buy all the stuff for their children the school requires?" A comment from a reader points out how easy it is to interoperate with Office 2007 from earlier versions.
Why is it that so many school districts are so quick to buy expensive Micro$soft software when free (and sometimes better) alternatives exist, then turn around and complain about not having enough money?
The district suggests they buy a discounted version restricted to educational use. Tough luck if the home PC is for the whole family.
What functionality is OO.o lacking that would prevent junior from writing an essay and printing it out to turn in?
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
It is a bit strange to propound that managing interoperability between the two versions is a tedious process. I think that a sheet of paper with instructions would be sufficient, even for the most computer illiterate students, few though they may be.
Concerning free alternatives, I don't think that we should expect widespread adoption of things such as OpenOffice, at least in public schools, for quite some time. Not all teachers are geeks, and they want to use that which they are accustomed to using. Even the slightest change can throw some people off.
This is quite a contrast to, say, university computer science departments, which are often filled with Linux computers, while the rest of the campus uses a plethora of Microsoft suites. It's just a different culture, with different expectations of what their computers and their computer software should do. When I tried to get my parents, who are not computer illiterate, to use OpenOffice, they became irritated, because they didn't want to have to learn something new. They just want it to work as expected, so that they can do what they need to do, in the way that they know how to do it. That's not unreasonable.
When moving to a new system, one must always weigh the cost, in time (and, consequently, money), of educating the people in the new software. Most of the world uses Microsoft Office. Unless someone releases something so similar to Office that it is nearly indistinguishable, this will likely remain unchanged, no matter how equal or superior the alternatives, free or not, are.
For what they do in most grades, notepad would be all they needed.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Yeah, because there are just a million things you need to use spreadsheets for in high school (or college for that matter). I can't recall using very many (if any) during my school years... I certainly didn't have to do anything that would have required MS Excel that any other spreadsheet program couldn't have done just as easily.
Given the high cost of education now, with education costs often comprising the vast majority of the municipal budget, especially for small towns, it is highly irresponsible for schools *not* to be considering and using as much free software as possible. If they are further going to drag parents into it, then it is doubly true as it becomes just another tax, unless companies are willing to provide free software to both schools and parents. Commercial software companies such as Microsoft have every right to a profit motive, but school districts also have a responsibility to use the least expensive recourse and there is no sustainable argument that commercial software is better than free software for education purposes at this point.
As a paid shill for Microsoft and Transcend, I think parents should also buy Vista Home Premium, which can be easily installed on Transcend compact flash drives.
"If students use an older version of Microsoft Office at home, it is usually possible to translate their projects back and forth between different versions of Microsoft Office,"the letter said. "However, this can be a tedious process, and information may not be always be translated properly."
Basically what they're saying is, "We standardized on crappy software that probably isn't even compatible with its own previous version, so you better buy the newest one too so your kids won't be stupid."
Having worked in a school district IT department was a real eye-opener. There were tight budgets with no money for building critical infrastructure. But we'd all be damned if we didn't have the latest versions of Office and new computers to run them on.
I pushed open source wherever possible, even in the back-end, but it was a real uphill battle. We'd buy the $299 Adobe Acrobat when all they needed to do was make PDF files, and for that, something like PDF Creator http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/ is great - and free. And even after I demonstrated how easy it was to use and how good the results were, there was still resistance.
I wonder what kind of break the school district gets for pushing parents to upgrade?
First of all, school isn't (strictly) about job preparation; it's about education. And they'll encounter any variety of things in the corporate world, not just Office. If their skills are good, they'll adjust to whatever they've got put in front of them. School is most importantly about learning to learn.
But aside from all that, if schools start using, say, OpenOffice, you might start to see corporations do the same. And since it's taxpayers funding the software acquisition, I'd rather the district stick to the free option so long as it works well enough for the students' purposes.
And we all know that kids are incapable of learning more than one piece of computer software in any genre.
Which is why video game sales failed. Once the kids learned to play Tetris, they couldn't learn to play Counter-Strike.
Everyone knows that you cannot teach the kids HOW to write. And then leave it to them or their employer to teach them the keystrokes/mouse moves for the word processor that they will be using. You have to teach them on the only software package they'll ever be able to use for the rest of their lives.
As an IT employee for a public school system, I am not surprised at all. These people live and breath Microsoft products. Outside of the IT department, OSS is practically taboo in my district.
Its ridiculous to the point of sheer ignorance.
And spreadsheets work fine in OOo.
I've always found it funny that every time you install a new version of Windows, during the blue install screen it keeps popping up features that are new about this version of the operating system. I specifically recall going from 98SE to ME (which was a nightmare, I might add) and laughing audibly at the "We have made keeping your photos and music organized easier than ever!" and "Now ME makes it simpler to use your computer to do..." Basically, these were all vaporware statements.
With that said, aside from it being "easier than ever to do..." can someone give me a REAL example of how office has changed from 2000 to 2007? I'm serious, I want to know what features have been added (and I don't mean changed to the GUI that make it prettier) that actually ADD FUNCTIONALITY. This is the real reason that this story makes me mad. I don't believe that it has really changed at all, let alone enough to charge me a $100+ to upgrade.
All I know is that 2007 is looking to be the first step for Microsoft to begin its DRM document implementation where it can lock down it's DOC format that will require people to stay with a certain level of Office or higher if they don't want to lose their documents."Thank you for using Stop-n-Drop, America's favorite suicide booth since 2008"
My friend uses OOo Calc for her assignments and I believe she is attending FSU. So if it's good enough for them then I imagine it's fine for whatever high school assignment you need.
What would be wrong though is if the school recommends a specific product without having it freely available in their computer labs. If the children can't have access to Microsoft's products at school after the teaching hours then there is a problem. Before recommending parents to buy a product I would make sure the kids can have access to a good computer lab.
>>By the way, Batavia, IL isn't exactly a poor area. I bet most of the families in that Chicago suburb could afford the $150 expense.
The other arguments have be handled so I'll tackle this one. When you say "most" of the families can afford $150, what about the rest? Frankly, schools should NEVER allow a rich student to get disadvantages over poorer ones. There are enough ways to do so already (private turoring, cliff notes, etc.) Why mandate a new one?
Complain to the school board they are pushing a single vendor and not teaching. Contact your state representatives as well.
If they refuse to do anything, vote them out, and run yourself. And refuse to play this game in the first place.
Unless the class is "how to use office 2007" and an elective, they have NO right to dictate this, remember they work for you, not the other way around.. ( even if you can get educational versions for 25 bucks )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
As unfortunate as it is, Office dominates the corporate landscape, and Office 07 or greater will eventually be the status quo. It's to a student's advantage to spend considerable time with that application suite. They will need to become familiar with its interface, idiosyncrasies, and annoyances. Running Open Office is not the same learning experience, especially for those who are not as as technosexual as we are.
I've instructed digital media the university level, and I try to recommend free or affordable software as often as possible, yet their are some poison pills you need to swallow. Office is a god awful suite of applications and most kids will need to learn how to interact with it.
That said, hopefully they will setup good computer labs for kids who can't afford the software or don't wish to buy the software.
If anyone else needs me, I'll be the guy in the corner being pummeled by the guys with the Open Office t-shirts.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
I recently became the sysadmin for a nonprofit. First thing they had me do was install 7 copies of XP on 7 P3 900mhz 256mb RAM IBMs that were donated. We also had 7 licenses for Office 2007, but I opted to install OpenOffice first and see if they were happy with that. Then the first person I upgraded for threw a tantrum because Writer didn't have a "diploma-style border" available and "it doesn't have the fonts I need! (neither did Word)". Needless to say, I gave them Office 2007, which runs amazingly slow on those computers. Everyone except this one woman uses word processors for very basic writing tasks, but now they all want 2007... and they were so incredibly happy when it got installed. Microsoft's influence is just that strong. People want what Microsoft peddles. It doesn't matter if it works better. That's what they're used to, that's what they know, that's what they've learned to use through rote tasks, that's what they'll continue to try and use. Hell, they looked at 'ribbon' and thought it was the best thing that was ever created for an office suite, and one of them started giggling with glee. Help me T_T
As much as I want to sing the praises of Open Office, Microsoft's version wipes the floor with it, I mean, the new graphics and stuff in it make all the presentations and A3 posters which I am made to do at my school. Fact is: Teachers like perfect presentation. MS Office works, it looks good and makes things easy- Open Office is a struggle all the way and doesn't look any good in the end.
I recall using it quite a bit in Physics classes for lab results.
I am the maverick of Slashdot
It lacks nothing a junior would need, but it's still a tough call. I feel schools have a duty to give children the skills they will need in order to make it. In this era, I think that means having rudimentary word processing skills. Maybe I'm off-base. MS Office is a de facto standard for business communications, and so forcing students to learn it and develop skills in it is a good thing. We're not talking about merely teaching kids to type documents on a computer. Were that the case, DOS and PFS First Choice would suffice... Man, I hated that program. Still, this decision has an unfortunate effect of steering potentionally new and uninformed computer users straight to Microsoft, and it forces parents to spend a lot of money on a product their kids really don't need.
I would have standardized on an output format, and then provide a list of applications capable of producing output to that standard. If you're capable of writing a term paper to spec using an old edition of Adobe PageMaker, all power to you. But what do I know, I'm only a scientist who things about shit like this all the time. The decision makers at the school district don't think about these things, and probably only considered Word Perfect as an alternative. We're dealing with an audience that likely buys all of their software shrink-wrapped, so it makes sense that OO.o wasn't chosen.
Even the SC spreadsheet does "complex formulas and scripts" just fine. TeX works for "complex formulas" much better than anything else.
Even troff is usable for most word processing. It is (arguably) superior to Word in several ways.
I will argue that since Word is not capable of SIMPLE formatting in a sane way, it is not a tool that should be used.
If you need a heading (for example) that has parts that are both flush left and flush right, a tab must be set on right margin. The tab cannot be set relative to the margin, and thus, when the right margin is adjusted, the tabs must be manually adjusted. Word fails at this simple task. Neither TeX or TROFF has this problem.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
True, but if Office 2007 is what the kids will be learning at school, then Office 2007 is what they need to be using.
In college all of our high-level math courses were geared around the TI calculators. They are great machines, and I finally got my hands on a couple of them, including the TI-92. However, at the time I borrowed a friend's Casio, because I was dirt friggen poor. Guess what? I spent a LOT more time translating operations between the calculators than I spent on the course work.
I use Microsoft Office and StarOffice (Sun's commercial OO.o) and interact with customers in the two formats frequently. There are pluses for each one, but I lose a good bit of formating between the two, especially conditional formating and certain complex formulas. I work with it because I am familiar and comfortable, but in a learning environment one should spend more time learning the curriculum than how to work differently. If you want to use FOSS alternatives in school, pick a different school, or try to convince your school (or instructors) to use them.
The idea of corporations switching to software like OO.o instead of Office (or The Gimp instead of PhotoShop, etc.) is not highly likely. What is taught in school, especially at the college or vocational technology level, does not frequently drive what happens in the corporate world. A massive shift from corporate standards at the learning level would be a disservice to students: you enter college with the expectation that you will leave with universally marketable skills.
A better approach might be to offer alternative software courses which would count as elective courses towards a degree. Or even make such a class a requirement in programs like CS, IS, or MIS, so that students come out with a more rounded approach and understanding. I believe that would be more likely to induce a shift at the corporate level than a sudden change by attrition.
I have personally survived 3 years of engineering at U of Maryland using only Calc for spreadsheets. And yes, I survived high school too.
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
Here I go feeding the trolls again.
Let me ask this:
What is "wrong" with Office 2003? Forget about opposition to OO.o. Why upgrade to 2007? If there is something wrong with 2003, what is it?
I'm really stuck for a business case for the upgrade... what might it be?
Upgrading is a viral problem the way I see it. And without using Microsoft as an example, I'll turn to Adobe instead. There's this supposed standard we call "PDF." Once upon a time, I was looking over some job opportunities. The forms needed for the application process were in "PDF" format. The problem was that my PDF viewers kept prompting me for a password to view them. When I contacted the potential employer about the password issue, they told me there was no password.
As it turned out, the "password" or key in this case was to use Adobe Acrobat Reader 8. There is something about 8's new format that stopped me from being able to open it with anything else. So much for it being a "standard" and "portable" format. While I'm sure that this problem will be addressed in subsequent OSS PDF readers, it would seem that Adobe has introduced some changes that keeps the target for "compatibility" and "portability" moving.
In the end, business and other non-entertainment computing is largely about data acquisition, processing, storage and presentation. For acquisition and storage to keep going into the future, "standards" must be maintained. As "standards" keep changing, problems are introduced. If these standards are owned and kept as secret, this limits potential for data acquisition and storage to that which the owners of the secrets are willing to support. They keep the secrets and ultimately our data.
When computing was a young and developing thing, the value of new technologies and progressiveness trumped compatibility. We are either in a plateau or at a level of maturity in technology such that truly new and novel technologies are rare and the value of these new technologies does not trump compatibility or interoperability with our ever-growing pool of archival data. (I'll remind all readers that there is clear example and precedent where new technologies are often suppressed in order to perpetuate an existing business models which may explain the plateau or apparent maturity of information technology as we know it.)
The irony of the maturity of information technology is that there's a great deal less true motivation for "upgrading." It is my view that people have just grown accustomed to "upgrading" without thinking about it. Costs involved are often just written into the budget and on and on... fortunately, people ARE, in fact, asking that crucial question: "WHY?"
than I will and using more polite words, but:
What type of retard would not be able to use MS Office after having used Open Office?
And are they the same retards that will have trouble handling a transition from MS Office 2003 to 2007?
A while back our County contracted for computer literacy testing for merit pay purposes for the office workers. The contractor asked which word processor the workers used and was told Microsoft Word, Well the contractors showed up and administered the test using pagemaker! The people who passed with reasonable scores knew word processors, the people who didn't just memorized click streams. If you can't jump back and forth between similar programs your just sorry and your job will probably be sent to a third world country.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Your college math was geared around built in proprietary function calls that had to be translated to the point that you spent more time translating than working on math?
I was in engineering which is about as applied as it gets and we weren't even allowed to use calculators for the vast majority of our math studies.
All the real mathematicians are weeping if that is what passes as college math courses these days.
Apparently, the school board has realized that Office 2007 is not compatible with other versions of Office since MS-Word makes the new scary ".docx" files. However, instead of making everyone in the city upgrade, why not just go under options and change MS-Word to save as the standard ".doc" files. This way, the school board will only waste tax payer money once. Silly school board.
Basically what they're saying is, "We standardized on crappy software that probably isn't even compatible with its own previous version, so you better buy the newest one too so your kids won't be stupid."
You need to point out the long list of organizations rejecting both Office 2007 and Vista, particularly the US FAA and DOT. If the school district wants to be in step with government and business, it needs to hold off and consider migrating to gnu/linux.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It would be very interesting if someone got caught using cracked copies of Vista and Office 07 to comply with this.
Civil disobedience and subversion don't seem to be part of polite Western society any more, but still, one can dream. That society at large and a judge in particular would be sympathetic to a parent who is forced to pay the MS tax "for the sake of the children" when low-cost and no-cost alternatives exist.
I can just imagine a tired looking soccer mom and middle management dad sitting in front of the camera with fists full of back-to-school bills for clothes, calculators, cell phones, computers, printers, sneakers, band equipment, sports equipment, more clothes, paper, cool pens, text books, binders, and yet more clothes...holding up one more bill for Vista, Office 2007, and the new computer required to RUN THEM, and saying into the camera "Why should we pay for this when there are free legal alternatives that work just as well and when nobody asked our opinion before this decision was made. If there really is no alternative to using MS products then the cost of MS is a tax, and MS should ergo be expropriated in order to hold it accountable to the taxpayers that fund it. We therefore refuse to pay tax to MS until said company becomes answerable to its tax base, or until our school district specifies at least one alternative zero-cost software environment that would impart NO SCHOLASTIC PENALTY."
I know. But one can dream, can't one?Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
If you think you need this specific version of Office to make good documents then you are illiterate and no software will help.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
What if a student's household only has a Mac or Linux computer
Maybe the school district should serve applications over the internet to students using Citrix, or MS terminal server, so everyone is on the same version, wether it is on the latest Windows PC, an iPhone, Mac, Linux, BSD, MSDOS
Schools should be teaching how to use computers.
They are not supposed to teach "click here, then this happens, click there, to do that" just Microsoft software.
They're not particularly straight forward on Slackware. Before you say I should try another distribution keep in mind that I don't actually like Linux, I like Slackware.
The Farewell Tour II
When I was in school...no, we didn't use clay tablets and styluses, or papyrus, shut up, whippersnapper...we learned how to use a word processor.
It wasn't Microsoft Office. It wasn't even Microsoft Word, the standanone version before there was a monolithic Office. It was Bank Street Writer, on an Apple II. At home, I used something else, on my 386...I actually don't even remember what it was...maybe PFSWrite.
In High School, I was introduced to Word. At the same time, I was using Wordperfect at home. I still managed to type up the 3-5 papers a year that were required to be typed and even got into an argument over a threatened "F" from my sophmore English teacher who refused to believe I could do a "rough draft" of my final paper on the computer as well as I could on actual paper (I eventually wrote out verbatim what I had originally saved as my first draft, she wouldn't take it, but she didn't fail me as she'd threatened, I think she finally realized it was a stupid requirement).
At college, we used both Word and WordPerfect as well, and I also used Abiword in the dorm room on my Linux (Slackware, running kernel 1.0.somethingEarly, installed from floppies) and printed across the campus to the labs where I had a friend working their shift grab my papers off the printer.
The point is...as some poster in here commented...these aren't "Ofice 2007" classes these kids are taking. They're learning to type and use computers in general. Learning and using a different word processing package is mostly trivial if you already know how to use one. That the school district is "strongly suggesting" (as in, "We strongly suggest you buy our protection insurance, we'd hate for something bad to happen to your family's store, ya know?") that families upgrade to MSO2007 indicates that the school ddistrict itself doesn't really understand just why they should and do have and need computers in their schols in the first place.
As another poster said...contact the school board and administration. Explain why they're wrong. If they still don't get it, make sure you vote at the next election, in most places, that's in about 4 months, you have plenty of time to spread the word about how your current board and administration are more interested in spending their hard-won budgets on hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Microsoft software while cutting programs in your students' curriculums.
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
The people who passed with reasonable scores knew word processors
Unfortunately, the testers didn't. Pagemaker is a desktop publisher, not a word processor. They might as well have told them to write in Eudora, it's close enough.
And yes, I get the point they were trying to make.
I think they should be forced to use a Cray, or an Eniac. That ought to weed out the riff-raff.
Seriously this is insane. We won World War 2, built the SR-71, flew to the moon and back, built and flew the Concorde without a single loss of life for over thirty years with a slide rule and a typewriter. Now, with all our fancy computational chicanery, we have a broken down space pick-em-up truck that was twice wrecked and can't be used more than twice a year, if even that, a fixer upper space habitat, a decrepit, half blind space telescope, and we can't get back to the moon if our life depended on it. And the schools think that a secretary's office program will save the day? We are in a heap of trouble. The art of learning is going straight down the toilet.
What?
screw that, what's wrong with office 97? It's 5 times faster than Office 2003 and honestly feels overall far better than Office 2003 or newer.
Even if you do the advanced Access Database stuff, it's just fine for 90% of what businesses do and 98% of any school needs.
honestly I cant understand the mental illness of "gotta upgrade". My daughter's school was icthing to upgrade their horribly out of date 3 year old Mac towers in the Media classroom to new intel mac towers and buy Final Cut Studio 2 for each of the machines. I stood up and asked...
"is it wise to replace WORKING computer and software with over $15,000.00 of new when the kids dont even have enough decent cameras to do the projects? how about actually buying cameras, tripods and lighting gear instead of replacing perfectly good editing computers and software that is STILL state of the art?"
The school IT director tried to come up with a reason, the funniest was "updated virus protection" where I could not hold it in and blurted out a laugh, and said, "That is not an issue, ask anyone that is an IT professional."
I called for a vote and the parents sided with me, which utterly pissed off the It director as he had to hand $15,000 of his budget over to the Media director... I'm betting that shenanigans were being pulled and he wanted to spend it on something else.
A couple of other parents then started questioning his other requests, like vista upgrades. It was an entertaining and long night, being a private school all paying parents get a vote in school policies and get to call school officials on the carpet at these meetings.
If high school students learn on final cut 5.1, they will not ball up on the floor crying when they see final cut 6 in two years at college. The exact same thing will happen if they use an older version of office or god forbid and alternative.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Only if you define 'excellent' as 'uses flawed methodology' or perhaps 'gives wrong results'.
s
http://www.google.com/search?q=excel+formula+flaw
if it is Florida State University, Go Noles!
Screw FSU, Go Gators!
(I have no problem losing karma over that, it was worth it.)
So, your job's pay was dependent on you knowing how to use pagemaker, even though you don't use it in your day-to-day job? How is that merit pay?
I understand most people should be able to pick up on any word processor put in front of them, but that's not relevent to the question at hand. Maybe the people were Microsoft-product literate. A better test would be to ask the people to do the work in a Finnish version of Office. Those who got reasonable scores would know the keyboard shortcuts and how the menus are laid out, which is all an enduser needs.
And, about your last statement, my reply would be: If you cannot use proper grammar, you're just sorry and your job should probably be sent to a third-world country. See how that's more relevent to word processor skills than knowing 'F7' means spellcheck?
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Your approach is interesting -- but I don't think it works. Try changing the page margin after this operation. Does the table need adjusting?
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
I work in the IT Department at a fairly rich public school district, and we have made the decision to go with Open Office. Obviously it makes no sense forcing kids to upgrade to Office 2007, and this way we will be saving over $100,000 in licensing fees and may be able to hire extra staff with the saved money. This also solves the problems of kids bringing in documents saved in open standards and not being able to open them up at school (quite the large problem).
This is getting ridiculous.
People very rarely use MS Word beyond the functionality that Wordpad offers. And they very rarely use MS Excel as anything but a way to arrange text in columns and rows.
So, not only will these students be able to use different tools; they will also learn very little from it. And when they get jobs in the future, noone will expect them to have learned anything -- because everyone treats MS Word as if it was Wordpad.
It's a mystery why so many organizations are fixated on Microsoft software. But it's a bigger mystery why, when they have that software, they don't use more than a tiny fraction of its capabilities -- less than they ought to in order to use it efficiently!
I ran into this this very semester.
Excel has one big advantage over Calc: Both will let you create a graph with a trendline, but Calc won't give you the *equation* for said trendline. Kind of important when you're looking for the slope and/or derivative...
Go Go Gadget Copter!
No, your approach is wrong. Why? Because semantically, it's not a table, it's a heading! If you hack up your document using a table instead you might still get the same visual effect, but the structure of it will still be very, very Wrong.
Among other things, this would screw up the outlining function, table of contents, parsing by search engines, parsing by text-to-speech engines, etc.
Of course, then you get into the issue that everything Word-like programs do is Wrong, and that people ought to be marking up their documents in some semantic markup language (e.g. TeX, DocBook) instead. But I digress...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
and whenever they start teaching it i pull out my laptop and get back to working on whatever program i was coding last. as far as teaching technology at my school goes, well it sucks. Other than the programming classes, which are taught on a linux lab that is free of district bullshit and student maintained, all of the technology lessons are mostly repeats of what they taught us to do in elementary school. We recently got a brand new computer lab, new hp desktops with LCD's and win xp, but the district techs are idiots and the current technology specialist is an idiot and lazy. I don't go to a bad school ( well actually i do but for different reasons ) but why are districts always pushing bullshit that even the schools don't want?
n ta+vista/
among our districts genious decree's:
no linux webservers
linux is a social disease
sites about linux or open source are "hacking" and blocked
only the head district tech can get around content filtering ( not even the pricipals can bypass )
all internet for all the schools is routed through the district office
it goes on
WHY! WHY ARE IDIOTS RUNNING THE SCHOOLS? FUCKING THINK OF THE CHILDREN, THEY'RE SMARTER THAN YOU!
and for anyone wondering what school this is, your answer is: Monta Vista, i suggest looking it up on urbandictionary.com
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=mo
Jayne: "These are stone killers, little man. They ain't cuddly like me."
98% of America's teens drink alcohol, smok
Unless you know anything of the base mathematics, in which case you can come up with it yourself readily.
You shouldn't be using the "display equation" in Excel, since it doesn't have any notion of significant figures, and can give you crap results if the intercept and the slope differ by orders of magnitude. You should be using the slope() and intercept() functions for linear fits (which also exist in Calc) so that you have the numbers in cells. You can format the cells to display the proper number of sig-figs, and have the numbers available in a cell for further calculations.
If you need to fit more than a line, then you should know how to transform the data into a linear problem. If you need something more sophisticated than the ordinary least-squares fit to the transformed problem, then you probably should be using a tool other than a spreadsheet.
Displaying the equation on the graph will only work if you have few sig-figs and all parameters of the fit are of equal orders of magnitude. And even then, you won't be able to DO anything with the numbers other than display them.
"Uh... yeah, Brain, but where are we going to find rubber pants our size?" --Pinky
Printable http://www.kcchronicle.com/articles/2007/07/27/new s/local/doc46a9cc9908105330494432.prt
Why UNIX?
It's under Data Series/Statistics. There's a selection of bars and indicators.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I teach IT is a high school in England and our IT manager recently decided to forego the £8,000 per year MS Office site license and go with open office. Now I'm certainly an advocate of open source software, but let me bring a few realities home to you:
Open Office is still not entirely stable. In terms of word processingand DTP it seems to be fine, but some of the spreadsheet functions that the kids need to use in projects (like webquery) make it crash. In fact, it crashed when the whole staff were being demonstrated it when the idea came up...
The Database software is no good for teaching; A-level and GCSE projects require the use of Macros, and teh database software does not have these. This means we have had to buy a 100 user license to MS office just so these kids can do their coursework. The alternatives of using Java and the like are unrealistic.
For most people it is a big step: many have used nothing but office, and that means they'll be confused come September when new programs are thrown at them; we're going to have to take some time out to familiarise the kids (and staff) with some of the features and quirks. We also have a huge number of books on spreadsheet and database use that would be defunct, and hundreds of teaching resources that we need to redevelop in our own time.
The reality of it is that making a switch to open office can be something of a nightmare, and I imagine that many organisations won't bother. The savings would take a good while to manifest themselves after the initial confusion/retraining/whatever. We were told last year that come this year there would eb no MS Office, Open Office was on the network and we should use it to keep familiar with it, but of cours nobody wanted to do that so now they're all doubly screwed.
Of course, then you get into the issue that everything Word-like programs do is Wrong, and that people ought to be marking up their documents in some semantic markup language (e.g. TeX, DocBook) instead. But I digress...
I don't agree with your first assertion - everything Word-like programs do is Wrong - rather I think it is that people try to use Word like programs for things it really isn't suited. Such programs are great tools for automating what was once done manually with a type writer - i.e. writing and editing text; essentially they are a modern version of paper tape and Baudot code.
Unfortunately, as features get added people started using the tool for things it wasn't designed to do (and where the developers didn't sit down and learn from the right tools how to properly implement features; the electronic version of using a pair of pliers as a socket set.
Which brings me to your second point - people ought to be marking up their documents in some semantic markup language - with which I agree. Unfortunately, most text markup programs don't function very well as word processors so people still need Word or it's clones to do the text creation and then must move the text to a layout tool; as a result most people simply try to do the layout in their word processor and develop a set of kludges and work arounds. For example, to accomplish the OP's text layout and do TOCs you can insert tables and use hidden text to keep the header information from which to build the TOC, but that, AFAIK, requires unhiding the headers when you update the TOC so you have to carefully, manually break the pages or risk the page numbers being in error do to the now unhidden text re-wrapping the real text.
Then again, we do our page layout in PowerPoint via notes pages - talk about a stupid solution.
Which gets to my argument - this is where OSS development misses an opportunity - instead of building a free copy (sort of) of Office - develop a whole new and better way of doing it. Unfortunately I doubt that will happen because it would require a consistent vision and someone to enforce that; which is not the way most OSS communities want to work.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
our local school district has some sort of deal worked out, where local parents can buy OEM software through a distributor and get really fantastic deals. Office 2003 was about $40; Acrobat was less, etc.
When my friends first asked me about it (I have no kids) I thought they had come across some sort of spam site selling pirated software- but it's fully legit, they just have an arrangement to channel all the sales to a particular vendor who gives a big discount on top of the educational pricing.
So any school district with a good # of kids is looking at some powerfully persuasive arguments to get good pricing for their students; and as a parent, having access to all this software for a fraction of the list price is pretty nice too...
(that being said, Office 2007 is a pain. I like how they have redesigned it, but I am LOATHING how much work I am going to have to do to get our users swithched...)
EOM
Kids (even in high school) often do not realize that one program will not necessarily open files from another. We see this ALL THE TIME in our high schools here in Pasco County, FL. Kids buy some piece of crap PC that comes with WordPerfect and then bring their files in on floppy disks in WordPerfect format and wonder why Office won't open it. We need two things:
1. Students need to learn that applications use proprietary formats and they're not interchangeable - you CAN save as text or rtf but you'll lose formatting, and
2. We, as a country (and as a planet, for that matter,) are really being hurt because we don't have one universal document file format type that all word processors can read and write. We USED to - it was called "text" or ".txt" as Windows users are wont to call it.
Telling kids they "ought" to fork out $150 for Microsoft software is irresponsible. We are a Mac based school district and as soon as OpenOffice runs native on OS X, I will be recommending it to ALL of our schools K-12, not as a replacement for Office, but as an alternative to Office. Then kids can, if they want, run the same suite at home and at school, for free.
Music - www.richardmac.com
In other words, "Blah, blah, blah, American schools suck, they don't teach, and they're only about indoctrinating kids into needing government to take care of them." Congratulations, you're on the bandwagon.
What "dose of propaganda" are you referring to? Are you one of those religious nuts that refuses to believe in evolution? Or just a malcontent who things schools are sanctioned by the government in trying to turn all of our children into Socialists? Either way, it's no wonder kids are turning out badly with parents who have such disdain for our educational system.
Here's a thought: Public education was never intended to be the be-all and end-all of a child's education. You are supposed to be (gasp!) a partner in your child's education. If there's something you think your kid needs to learn that the school isn't teaching them, you are supposed to teach them. People who drop their kids off in the morning, pick them up in the afternoon, and expect all of their educational needs to be met with no fuss and no muss are idiots, and there are a depressing number of those people around now.
Are there problems with schools? Sure. Surprisingly enough, just like everything else in our world, I'll be the first to admit that they're not perfect. It's reasonable to expect that a few times in your child's educational career, they'll have a bad teacher. This isn't a failure of the entire educational system, it's called LIFE, and believe it or not, even that teaches children valuable lessons in dealing with people and situations they don't like. Guess what. Once they get out of school and into the work force, they'll probably have a few bad bosses, but oddly enough, I don't see people using that as an excuse to say that capitalism and the free market is a failure.
Or maybe you're one of these nuts who supports publicly-funded school vouchers to private schools. If you want to send your kid to a private school, more power to you. But don't you dare ask for my tax dollars to do so if you don't like the school that my tax dollars has already provided for your kid. I find it extremely stupid and hypocritical that the people yelling because they're having pay for public schools that they don't want to send their kids to are asking for other people to help pay to send their kid to a private school.
Or perhaps you just think we should privatize schools. I've got news for you. Until around 1870, schools were privatized. Why do we have public education now? Because it didn't work, at least not very well. The result was that rich people's kids were educated, poor people's kids were not. Our public education system was one of the key factors in our country becoming a superpower, and almost all modern nations have public education and have greatly benefited from an educated general public. As hard as it may be to believe, even rich people greatly benefit from an educated general populace.
As for the rote memorization and other teaching methods, I hate to burst your bubble, but some things are a pain in the ass to learn, and the best way to do it is to memorize it. If you think that memorization doesn't serve an educational function, please don't ever sing the alphabet song to your kid. That kind of thing is way too rigorous. Don't teach them to spell, either, I guess they'll just pick it up through, I dunno, sleeping with a book under their pillow and absorbing it through osmosis I guess.
Besides that, I don't know what kind of schools you went to, but by the time I was in ninth grade or so, my classes actually rather free of rote memorization. In English, I had to write essays about symbolism in poetry. In history, I had to write about the impact of some battle to some war. In government/economics, I had to create projects that demonstrated methods of advertising. Even in math, the most rote class there probably could be, I had to use a wide base of knowledge that spanned the previous decade of learning to solve difficult
I had this argument with a teacher and was told I was arrogant, didn't see what that had to do with the discussion.. . ahem. You must realize the teachers "think" they need to "learn" each new program (even though many of them know nothing more about MS products other than Stupid Office Tricks), and that trying to teach another product would cause them undue harm. I tried to get a school to put at the end of a class (last day/week kind of thing) a little "other products" lesson but they would have none of it, even if I did the "showing" of the other products. Even though for a school district, OpenOffice is free, and SO IS STAR OFFICE, (fill out the form and they send you a disc that ALL YOUR STUDENTS and FACULTY may use), they see they are getting a great value discount "from $500 to $84". It is the old, "but it was on sale" mindset.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
I used latex for my lab reports. It looks a HELL of a lot better, and the formatting options are significantly nicer. Plus once you get your basics written, it's much easier to create a well formatted document in latex than screwing around with word. If you're smart enough to be performing physics labs above 101, you should be smart enough to learn latex...
Parents are asked to buy books for their kids that are used once and then sold back for much less than what they bought it for. So I don't see what the big deal is in asking parents to purchase software that will last them several years that costs about the same as a single college textbook (if they get it discounted, as the article mentions). Asking parents to fork out $500 is unreasonable, but asking them to fork out $80 is not.
Speaking from experience, earlier versions of Office used to be just about as unreliable as OpenOffice. I, too, used to use OpenOffice, but mostly because it could export to PDF. Office 2007, however, is much much more reliable and I have never lost my work. OpenOffice still has issues with data loss.
Also, kids don't know that they have to save to Office 2007 format from OpenOffice. They'll save in the default OpenOffice format, and get yelled at by their instructors for not having the right version. They'll also get yelled at because of formatting issues. Whenever I converted between OpenOffice and Office 2003 I always had to edit my paper.
I don't suppose submitting your assignment in PDF format is an option. That's what I've been doing. Besides, that's considered to be the appropriate format for finished products.
It sounds like a hack, not a solution. We're talking about headings here, not tables. TeX is very straightforward about formatting. In TeX, to make text flush with your margins is like saying exactly that, make the text flush with the margins. To make Word do this you need to add a non-intuitive object reminiscent of HTML in order to get the formatting you want. Word is a nice tool for people who're uninterested in knowing the internals of formating. However, I've never thought that mixing formatting and writing
would result in anything but poorer writing. It's hard enough to write well as it is, let alone when you're worried about making it look right at the same time. I'm ranting Knuthisms, sorry. Cheers.
I used spreadsheets for many years. I started with Lotus 123 for DOS. I also used Excel for years. I have also put considerable work into Open Office Calc. Take the time to friggen use it before you start spouting off. Hell, it reads and writes Excel files. That means it understands how to use the goodies in those spreadsheets. Stop with the FUD, sheesh.
I'd created spreadsheets that were massive, did huge calculations, look up, multi sheets, multi files, huge charting, printing, and macros.
What you are saying is that no product but the latest is a capable product. It just isn't true. Those older products were immensely powerful and capable spreadsheets. Open Office calc is far far far more advanced and capable.
So, get off your high horse. Open Office is a good solid alternative and should be the recommended choice by these educational institutions.
They are probably receiving funding from Microsoft through grants to get students to use their product because they believe that those students will demand and purchase those same products when they graduate into business.
BTW, the whole pre-college system was designed around the blue collar businesses to get workers trained for blue collar jobs. It is well documented.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Think about it though -- let's say that first thing Monday morning the OMB in conjunction with the National Archives and Records Service make an announcement that, henceforth, the Government will use only an ISO standardized open format to exchange documents. Assume also that they have the balls to make it stick. From the get-go, all 50 states and all government contractors have to switch to software supporting this open standard. From that point forward, it's a done deal as the rest of the economic food chain adopts the new software so that they can continue to communicate with the various federal state and local governments, contractors, subcontractors, etc.
It won't happen, but that's the only way to force the issue -- not up from the school level.
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
If you agree with me, why did you use <b> and <i> instead of <blockquote> to quote me, and asterisks instead of <em> or <strong> to show emphasis? (I won't comment on your apparent use of <br> instead of <p> for paragraphs, because for all I know Slashcode mangled that part itself.)
; )
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
In the end it all boils down to what objective do you want to achieve and how much time do you have to do it.
...
TeX is incredibly powerfull and can do pretty much everything you want to have a perfect document. The downside is that mastering TeX takes a long time and creating any document which is not long enough so as to justify designing a clean, well defined, structure and set of structural elements takes a lot more time with TeX than with (Open) Office.
The thing is, most of us don't have that much time available for documentation in our professional occupations since that is not our core occupation, and just want to finish the damn document so that we can go back to doing the real work.
It's not by chance that TeX is only really popular in academia and with those whose work is to create perfectly formated document (for publishing)
If there is something wrong with 2003, what is it?
Apparently, the menus weren't confusing enough.
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