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Comment by nhebb | Hacker News Reader

The OpenOffice site has a list of major deployments [1], and considering how long it's been available as an MS Office alternative, the list isn't that impressive.

Several years ago the local school district switched to OpenOffice. I happened to notice it during a teacher conference, so I asked the teacher how she liked it. I was pretty surprised by how much she hated it (I mean, she really hated it.). Of course, that's just an anecdote, but what's more telling is that the school district is back to using MS Office.

[1] http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.or...

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That's too bad. Schools are the one place that definitely should switch. The basic skills of writing, revising, presentation, and spreadsheet usage can all be taught just fine with OO. I switched to it (nearly) full time about a year ago and haven't had any problem. The idea that teachers make students pay for MS Office, simply because they can't be bothered to change, angers me.

I don't know too many teachers who can actually use the finer functionality of MS office. A reluctance to switch must have another origin.

The one place where I've had trouble with OO occurs when I sometimes teach using prepared presentations. I can modify them in OO, but if they have a bunch of A/V goodies baked in I'll use ppt player to present so that everything works easily. I usually run a show like that out of Windows, too.

Typical grade school teachers spend their days on their feet, rushing from one crisis to another, trying to help mainstreamed kids with serious disabilities, kids with chaotic home-lives and resulting learning and behavior problems, political mandates to teach to a standardized test regardless of what they think the kids really need, and so on. They don't feel they have time to figure out simple user interface problems like where did all these IE windows and tabs come from, let alone learn a new software suite.

I understand, but what they need to "relearn" isn't that hard. The skills are quite easily transferred, especially the skills that they would use an office suite for in grade school. And especially the skills that the grade school students would use an office suite for.

Like any population, some of the teachers are actually quite tech-savvy, and some will whine about anything. This is an area, however, where if I was superintendent I would make the switch and take a day or two of their "planning time" for training. It would be a good place for a "peer teaching" lesson plan.

When we first got computers, we had to teach the teachers what it meant to "save," how to insert and eject the disk, and so on. Transferring to OO would be much easier than that initial training.

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