4 ms·
You're going to need a whole new breed of faculty to support this. Tons of schools are still shackled to Office. I have tons of PowerPoint slides that look like
by bphogan 15y ago
You're going to need a whole new breed of faculty to support this. Tons of schools are still shackled to Office. I have tons of PowerPoint slides that look like crap when opened with Google Docs, and look even crappier when exported from Google Docs so I can share them with people who refuese to use the cloud. The same holds true for Word and Excel documents.
I'm not saying it's impossible... but I don't think the current education system is ready for that. Explain to the average college student (a non-techie) why the slideshow their professor gave them won't open on their Google laptop.
OTOH, our school is experimenting with lab virtualization, so all you need is the frontend software. I can run full Excel on my iPad, so maybe that's a usable route.
- samsoe 15y agobring on the new breed.
- mlinsey 15y agoMicrosoft's own online office site (docs.com) is underrated. Ironically enough it might become the killer app on Chrome OS.
- ch0wn 15y agoDoesn't it require Silverlight? I doubt you can easily install Moonlight on Chrome OS. EDIT: I just saw that they provide a crx version of the plugin, so it should be possible.
- memoryfault 15y agoThat's just for facebook. With a live account cou can office web apps tied with hotmail/skydrive.
- mestudent 15y agoYou just need a new breed of student, at my school almost all student presentations were done in google docs (the professors didn't mind, and wireless works well in the building). (This is pretty much limited to my class in the ME department though) All collaborative lab reports and student assignments were done in google docs as well, everyone pretty much communicates through gmail if they aren't talking face to face as well. It just depends on how people want to work, many students don't like having to spend all their time in the lab so they use Autodesk Inventor (free for students) over Pro/E Wildfire or Solidworks (in the computer lab). Students still do torrent the MS programs if they have to use them but when they don't they are fine with semi-equivalent free alternatives.
- IgorPartola 15y agoEasy. Just print everything to PDF.
- blocke 15y agoWe at work (a 4 year college) are busy moving all student email to Google Apps. The move will also cover network storage we currently provide to students. When evaluating our options we found that students didn't seem to care about Google Docs, Microsoft's online Office tools, etc.
- president 15y agoUCI?
- MatthewPhillips 15y agoThat stuff is easy to overcome. What is difficult to overcome is the anti-cheating software that only accepts .doc and .docx files