Hi Pete,
I'm a biology and geology teacher in highschool, in southwestern France.
In my highschool and in many highschool now in France, we let the choice
for students and for teachers to have MS office and Libre Office on the
same computer.
Libre Office is installed everywhere and really used. MS office is
disappering slowly because the headmaster just said that the teachers
who want MS Office have to pay for the lastest licence by using
pedagogicals credits.
For us, the main trouble is not to use free software under windows, but
to use only free software by installing GNU/Linux.
As teacher, we propose to student several kind of exercices which are
easy to do with both suite.
Hope it helps.
Laurent
France
Le 06/11/2013 22:22, Pete Wright a écrit :
I know what the answer to that question should be, but I am old enough
to know how ignorant I am (plenty), so this is a legitimate serious
question, not troll-bait.
My 16-year-old high school junior is in a State of Washington program
(Running Start) that lets students start college early, which she is
doing, carrying a full load of college courses plus a couple of high
school classes.
She is bright and reasonably computer literate, but she has been
writing for years and when the rest of the computer environment
doesn't let her work as fast as a word processor does, she gets
frustrated. She also has some health issues, so just letting her sink
or swim on her own is not the best option; hence my effort to help her.
The most recent bump she has hit is a biology assignment to make
graphs out of data; the examples (samples) are provided as txt files
and the instructions are to use Excel. Our first attempts to do the
job with Libre calc and/or base failed. Her instructor, via email,
just says "use the computers at school if you don't have Excel."
We don't own MS Office and because of her health and living more than
am hour away from campus, using the school's computers are not often a
good option.
So, should she be able to do in LIbre what she would be able to do in
MS Office? (I am assuming the college does not make much use of the
fanciest bells and whistles that probably differentiate the two suites.)
I can and do teach kids and adults how to use Gimp and Libre Writer
instead of their high-priced counterparts, but when it comes to
spreadsheets and such I barely know a range from an operator, so your
responses can be basic to the point of primitive without danger of
insulting me.
I am interested in broad general answers to the broad question in the
subject line, but would like to hear finer-grained answers about the
graph-generation issue, as well.
I tried a few years back to organize a local organization to persuade
our schools to use Open Source software instead of proprietary stuff,
but the teachers were all either Apple-only or totally computer
illiterate. When the others gave up, I did too, and the effort
fizzled. But I remain dedicated to using and proselytizing Open
Source; just not very good at it.
Helplessly yours, Pete
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