[Wolves] Re: Wolves Digest, Vol 85, Issue 19

[Andy Wootton]

Howard Berry wrote:

>On Sat, 2005-05-07 at 08:21 +0100, wolves-request at mailman.lug.org.uk
>wrote:
>
>  
>
>>You could start here..
>>
>>http://schoolforge.org.uk/index.php/Main_Page
>>
>>
>>"Welcome to Schoolforge-UK, the community of individuals and
>>organisations working to implement open content resources using Free,
>>Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) in UK education. "
>>
>>Cheers,
>>Al.
>>    
>>
>Hi,
>My partner is doing a qualification called FENTO. Its a hoop you have to
>jump through if you want to teach adults. She, like me had been using
>SuSE and Open Office. But it became such a pain for her and by proxy,
>me, having to cope with all the M$ Word docs that we decided it would be
>better if she returned to Windows. 
>  
>
My wife is currently looking for jobs and has found that OpenOffice 
can't read many of the horrible .doc application forms she is sent.
We discovered that AbiWord can read anything that OO.o can't (and is 
lightning fast.)

>There is a defacto standard that few people give any consideration to: a
>word processed document is a Word document. Education is definitlly
>"locked in" to this and few people feel they have the authority, the
>technical skill or the time to consider that there is an alternative
>that is open, ethical and cheap!
>  
>
It depends on how the school is funded and supported.  The school I will 
be helping out has opted out of the local authority IT support for 
'teaching' ICT to spend money on staff. We're not allowed to touch the 
admin. systems which the LA still support. By the way, my boss wants to 
upgrade them from Win 95 to Win XP. I see thin clients to Win and Linux 
servers as the way forward; using existing 700MHz PC clients.

The TES article is based on a new report from BECTA; right at the top of 
the food chain.

Woo