Guardian Poll on ICT in Schools

[elsiegee40]

The Guardian Online - School ICT Expenditure Survey

What future for technology in schools?Government funding, policy and programmes supporting technology in schools are all up for review. Outline your own school's priorities by answering and commenting on the survey below.

An opportunity for you to express an opinion on where the ICT money in schools should be spent and that includes voting against (or for ) BSF!

[Mr.Ben]

Link just says 'No more responses allowed' :-(

[elsiegee40]

Ooops

Link corrected

[glennda]

(Sims.net, the dominant management information system (MIS) in schools, is wedded to Microsoft Office)

I thought they had brought in support for open office?

[Sylv3r]

Thanks. Some interesting results but certainly no shocks.

[john]

Interesting, glad they seem to hate BSF on it, wonder if the government are looking at it, also glad to see CPD is on the list as something that is liked, wanted and needs funding

[Rydra]

Main problem i see with the MS vs Open Source, especially on the office front, is matching it within the local system.

As a Primary School NM, we cannot afford the Microsoft volume licensing (it would consume almost my entire annual budget!), and so look towards Open Office as an option for new machines.
The PROBLEM being, all the high schools, who are going through BSF, are going to be using Microsoft, and will be using 2007, if not 2010 by the time BSF actually finishes. And most of them use it already.
Because of the change to the ribbon from 2007, Open office is now essentially 10 years old in it's layout, and the skills and knowledge to use one is not (at least easily) transferred to the other.
From a compatibility point they might work together, but not from a teaching point.
Spending their first (and most important) years being taught one way, just to move schools and be tought a completely different system...