On Friday 02 March 2007, nigel barker wrote: > I have regular battles with parents, where I have to justify our use of > free software. I work at quite an expensive school where many of our > parents work with MS products every day, and believe their kids should > too.
how about starting from the following:
1) It is flat out impossible to teach kids on the products they'll be using
once they start working.
This has nothing to do with price but everything with the basic fact that
software changes pretty fast. Even if you use MS software the version of
MS office that'll be current at the time they leave school will have a
different interface.
(in other words don't teach kids to be click monkeys, there's to many
computer classes doing exactly that already. Which is the main reason
why we're currently in the sorry state where the average office worker
has to get the exact same training all over again, each time a new
version of MS Office is rolled out)
2) So if you can't teach kids the products they'll be using what do you do?
Well you do the same thing as with any other subject: you teach them to
see the concepts behind the individual actions, cause that's knowledge
that allows them to work with any program of a certain class instead of
only a specific program/version combination
(i.e. don't teach kids MS word recipes, teach them word processing
instead, idem for e-mail, web browsing, spreadsheet use, or whatever
other class of programs you're teaching)
-> you don't teach kids to use a specific brand of tool:
- when teaching kids to nail 2 boards together, any brand of hammer will
do
- when teaching kids to surf the web, any browser will do
- and likewise for any other class of tools (and saying program is just
another way of saying computer tool
Yes there are differences between tools of different brands, but they're
only skindeep, the same principles of use apply despite the differences.
Consequently anybody that's trown by those minor differences really
doesn't have much of a clue what they're doing, and when teaching the
whole purpose is to give kids a clue, right?
--
Cheers, cobaco (aka Bart Cornelis)
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