Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Oleg Goldshmidt]

On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 12:14 PM, geoffrey mendelson <
geoffreymendelson at gmail.com> wrote:

> With the high price of Macs here many parents just buy cheap PC's with
> Windows bundled


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.

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.
>

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.


> 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.


This is a lot of money, and again, from the sound of it this is not what is
normally called "generally available".

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.

No, the teachers know how to email. They would have to hire a webmaster to
> post them and coordinate the postings.
>

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).

 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?

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | oleg at goldshmidt.org
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