In IT for Every Classroom, Paul Keery shares his insights on technology news, trends and best practices in 21st-century teaching and learning.
Photo from The York School
One of my students presented me with an interesting problem recently. The student had just bought a new Macintosh laptop, but hadn’t been able to afford to buy either Apple’s iWorks package or Microsoft Office for Mac. TextEdit (Apple’s word processor that was already part of the laptop) could only work in a limited fashion with text, and did not allow the student to create PowerPoint presentations. The assignment the student had just been given required him to create a slideshow presentation. What was the student to do?
The Open Office Alternative
This has been an ongoing problem for years, and, with budgets tightening for IT, will become even more of a concern for schools and students. Licence fees for software packages are increasingly expensive, and often require an annual payment or renewal fees to keep the licence in effect.
There is a workable alternative: Open Office.
Open Office is an application package that includes six components: Writer (text documents), Impress (presentation creation software, similar to PowerPoint), Calc (a spreadsheet program), Draw (a graphics package), Base (a database creation program), and Math (an equation and formulae creation package). 
Open Office runs on both PCs and Macs, as well as other platforms such as Linux.
Open Office can open files produced in Microsoft Office and/or iWorks, so a student can receive files from other students made in these programs and work with them. Open Office does export files that can be opened by iWorks and Office as well.
The commands and tools have been standardized for each application, so once a person has learned how to use the formatting and graphics tools in one application, she can use those tools in each of the other applications included with Open Office.
Best of all, Open Office is free for anyone to use. There are no licence fees or other costs for a school to pay. Once downloaded, it can be installed on any or all of the computers owned by a school.
Using Open Office in the Classroom
After my student downloaded Open Office, he found that he was able to use it without too much difficulty. Within five minutes, he was working away at creating a slide presentation incorporating both text and images.
The application package is robust, and seems able to match both Microsoft Office and iWorks in the functions that the average student is most likely to need: word processing, presentation creation, manipulating spreadsheets and databases, and creating simple art and drawings.
If my student does have problems with the software, there are a number of resources that he can consult for help. The Open Office website does include useful FAQs as well as manuals and an Open Office wiki. Also, as Open Office is open source software, there is a community of designers and programmers available online to help with problems.
Researching and Downloading Open Office
Open Office can be found at its website: www.openoffice.org. The website is easy to navigate, and includes guides and tutorials to learn how to use the software.
So, if you need an alternative to the major software packages, Open Office is a good choice. It may not be as elaborate as Microsoft Office—but it works!
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What’s your view on Open Office and other open source software? Should schools go open? Share your thoughts in the Comments section below.
Related:
Schools Should Have Open Policy With Technology
Open Education: 8 Free Open Source Tools for Every Classroom
Dialogue Magazine: New Literacies
Building 21st Century Skills: Collaboration in the Digital Classroom