Re: [school-discuss] Feedback from Georgia Educational Technology Conference and a thought

[Bill Kendrick <nbs@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Nov 27, 2006 at 09:57:58AM -0600, Richard Houston wrote:
> Also I volunteer for a group that takes old computers and make them
> available to low income families. This is an existing project so we are
> trying to get some of the old ways removed and new ways put in. There is
> one guy up till now doing it in 2 centers. The computer comes with 40
> hours of training which is a MS curriculum. That fine but the systems
> going out will be 50% Linux and all will have OpenOffice and not MS
> Office. As a result the curriculum is not the most appropriate. If there
> was curriculum on Gnome and OpenOffice that would be very helpful.

This is one of those cases where the analogy: "automotive class teaches
how to repair _cars_, not how to repair _fords_"

I realize it's more work, but material that taught the basics of _each_
of the popular apps (including MS Word) would probably be the most useful.

In fact, I imagine something CSS-driven, where you'd have a chunk of
text explaining a concept, e.g.:

  Styles

    Text formatting and layout can be controlled using 'Styles.'
    Rather than increasing the font size, changing the font face, and
    enabling 'Bold' mode on each of your document's section headers,
    you can create a Style (called, e.g., "level 1 header") that you apply
    to each of the section headers.  Not only does this reduce the number
    of steps you need to take to set text's 'look', but if you later on
    decide that you want to use a different font, color, size, etc., you
    only need to change it once -- in the style -- rather than throughout
    the document.

    Using Styles:

      + OpenOffice.org

      + Abiword

      + Microsoft Word

Each of the "+"-bulleted items is actually a collapsed chunk of text that
would then expand when the item is clicked, e.g.:


   ...
   Using Styles:

     - OpenOffice.org

       Blah blah blah how to do it in OOo.  Screenshots, steps, etc. go here...

     + Abiword

     + Microsoft Word


Of course, more realistically, this kind of content would need to be
maintained for different VERSIONS of each application, since everyone keeps
redesigning their UIs. :)

But... 	I'm daydreaming now, sorry. :)

-- 
-bill!
bill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/