<div dir="ltr"><font face="georgia,serif"><br></font><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 12:14 PM, geoffrey mendelson <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:geoffreymendelson@gmail.com">geoffreymendelson@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">With the high price of Macs here many parents just buy cheap PC's with Windows bundled</blockquote><div><br>Well, whatever the bar chart of different HW/OS sightings may be in Israel, this IMHO utterly fails as an argument that a particular family *must* buy an Windows computer - inexpensive as it may be - if it does not have one, just to be able to view/print school assignments. I wonder if it is even legal on the part of a school to demand this.<br>
<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"> and get the student/home version of office (Word and Execel but no Outlook (scheduling/email) and Access (database)) which can be found on sale for as low as 300 NIS for a three computer license.<br>
</blockquote><div><br>Again, I may be naive but it seems to me that there is something basically wrong with the idea that public school education should depend on the parents' ability to "find" second-hand SW of uncertain provenance on a garage sale or wherever. <br>
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Last year (2010 school year) a student organization was offering a netbook with Windows XP and Office included for 1200 NIS. This year, there were still some being sold for as little as 800 NIS at places like Machsani Chasmal.</blockquote>
<div class="im"><br>This is a lot of money, and again, from the sound of it this is not what is normally called "generally available".<br><br>Now, I would assume that most on the parents in this discussion are qualified professionals with reasonably well paying jobs, and I would not be surprised if most had multiple computers at home, etc. Let's face it, it's not a representative sample of the general population. IMHO, "it's not that expensive" just doesn't cut it.<br>
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No, the teachers know how to email. They would have to hire a webmaster to post them and coordinate the postings.<br></blockquote><div><br>Good point. I assumed a school that requires pupils to have computers would have IT staff and a website. It ain't necessarily so (to quote the Gershwins).<br>
<br> I am ignorant of today's school procedures - whatever happened to "your homework is exercises 15.1 through 15.8 in your manual"? Or "write down your homework" at the end of the class? Or handouts? Why emailing is necessary?<br>
</div></div><br>-- <br>Oleg Goldshmidt | <a href="mailto:oleg@goldshmidt.org" target="_blank">oleg@goldshmidt.org</a><br>
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