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



Hi Bill,

Yes, I agree, exactly. As well, we have to look at other important areas such as:
a) Cryptography - how much of modern banking depends on this?
b) Typography - what are those chicken scratchings?
c) Unicode, Character Repertoires, etc.


These also need some attention in 'modern' classes.


Les Richardson Open Admin for Schools



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/