I haven’t had time to post lately, but I am chewing over something privately (well, it was private until now)–would we better off in schools if, technologically, if we had less money?
Then we might be forced to explore cheaper ideas, like free Wikispaces wikis.
We could spend more money on the hardware to connect us, and less money on the licenses.
Just a thought. Thanks for reading.
September 13, 2008 at 10:15 am
Last year, we encouraged to have Zoho Wikis. I made one, designed it so that students could turn in work online, put stuff on it – all this in the last six weeks of school (when Zoho was discovered by our IT dept and presented to the staff).
This school year, we were told everyone would have a wiki – through Wikispaces. So all the work I had already done? Yeah, just do it over. On this site. Because we changed our mind (didn’t do our research the first time? Didn’t bother to look into it, pick a wiki service the district truly liked before telling the faculty they should go ahead and get started now becuase next year this would [probably] be required? Don’t know.)
Another change we’d had this year is that we no longer have Microsoft Office on our computers (because, so the grapevine reports, with the money IT got back from the licensing fees, they’re going to tear down a wall in the IT office to make themselves a bigger office). Now we have to use OpenOffice, a cheap MS Office wanna-be, run from the web, which makes it unbearably slow.
Where to spend the money is always going to be a big question and the answer will probably never be unanimous… I agree that we need to look at the cheaper alternatives if they’re there, but sometimes there’s a very good reason why the cheap/free stuff is cheap/free…
(Then again, Google Docs is free, and was giving me some slowness problems yesterday when I played around with it, but it might work much better than OpenOffice, at least when it comes to presentations/PowerPoints.)