Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Moving to Different Productivity Apps II

I spent the morning at Mountain Valley High School in the new RSU #10. MVHS has had a 1-to-1 program for several years now with both teachers and students having Microsoft Office as their main productivity suite. But looking at the cost of licensing for students, it was decided to go with only staff having MS Office. This, of course, leads to concerns about being able to read files with different programs.

My job was to offer some options and offer assistance in difficult cases. During a staff meeting I reviewed options on Moving to Different Productivity Apps.

OpenOffice is a great addition to MLTI machines and can be downloaded and added to the "MyApps" folder quite easily. Of course, NeoOffice, Pages, Numbers and Keynote will meet most needs.

Many were excited to find out that just about anything could be turned into a PDF on the Maine laptops. If all else fails, simply save as a PDF and annotate as needed in Preview.

I spent the morning answering additional questions from staff and students. I'm so fortunate to be able to work with yet another great Maine school.

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