I work at the District level of a large K-12 county public school system (Pasco, in Florida.) My job is to train/support all of the school level tech specialists. I have a different perspective on this, I think.
It is pretty rare for one of our schools to "buy software" for the computer. 90% of our computer use is either word processing/PowerPointless, or web use. We used to buy a lot of software, but most of that has been replaced by free web sites, honestly. Money that used to go toward computer software now goes toward iPad software. The iPad is going to grow very very quickly in ed tech - it is definitely the place to be right now. Here's the reality out in the field, regarding web plugins. If a teacher wanted a web plugin on all the lab computers so they could go to one website and do one thing, some of our techs would do that for them, and some would not. I don't like it, but the techs don't report to us - we can't hire/fire them. But if the state required a plugin for state-level testing, all of our techs would do it. But in general it's probably been a long time since any of our techs actually installed a plugin for web browsers. There are two big trends right now - moving from Flash to HTML5, and moving to the iPad. A web site that required a plugin would also create a situation at home for the students, if the site was available for home use. The student would have to install the plugin, or the parents would. As funny as this may sound, there are people who may not know how. This is one reason why the iPad is so popular - you just USE the thing, you don't have to turn around and install plugins and crap like that. It's one reason they're selling millions of them. Freaking Windows tells you that it's not secure on first boot. People are sick of that crap. There are a lot of people out there, many of whom are responsible for keeping computers running, who don't want to install plugins. Despite all of that, I'm not thrilled that this is apparently going away, because I believe more choices are better than fewer choices. --- Richard MacLemale Music = http://www.richardmac.com Programming = http://www.macandchee.se _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
