I am a big fan of the open source movement, especially for use in the field of education. I use several open source tools, including GIMP for photo editing, Firefox for Internet browsing, Thunderbird with the Lightning add-on for email and calendaring, and Audacity for audio editing. Because we have Microsoft Office installed on our school computers, that is the Office suite that I use, but there are plenty of advantages to using Open Office. One advantage is that it is compatible with most other document types, so it is not too difficult to work with Microsoft products at school and Open Office at home. The other huge advantage is cost--free is good, especially when trying to bridge the "digital divide."
I am impressed with Google's efforts with Google Docs, but I am quite nervous about storing my documents out in cyberspace instead of on a couple of trusted hard drives. No offense to Google, but I also wonder what their angle is with providing so much storage space for free. On the other hand, they have provided some very useful tools for students to share and collaborate on documents. I really like their spreadsheets feature that allows you to publish a dorm and collect answers online, having the results dumped right into the spreadsheet. Just a few short years ago, doing that required special servers and the help of your network admin. With Google Docs, you can set it up on your own in a few clicks for free.
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