Thing # 18

On-Line Productivity Tools

I have been an Open Office user for the past year. This is all we use on our own personal computers at home. At first, I didn't care much for it because I was so used to used to using the Office suite. Now I have no problems with it. I was thrilled to know that it can be saved as a Word document (something I didn't know!) as this will make it easier for me to transfer my documents from home use to school use. I will also need to let our students know about this. Last year was a bit of a pain when the kids would bring in their essays that had been finished at home but needed to be printed at school. I was downloading the Open Office program and then converting the documents from there. If they know how to go ahead and save as a Word documant, we can avoid this issue which can be time consuming.

As far as use in school, we have just hired a librarian from Irving ISD that says her former district is only going to use Open Office to save the district money. The only thing I see as a hindrance is that the kids are so used to Office, they will have a brief adjustment period. The posistive side is that everyone has access to the program..FREE!

I have also been using Google docs. I am prepapring a presentation for an inservice and am using the Google version of Power Point. It is easy to use and located with all of my other Google programs. You don't get the wide variety of templates that Office offers, but they are adequate for what I am doing.