Microsoft Software Agreement
Posted by Allanahk on April 18, 2007
At the very end of last term all NZ schools got a memo from the Ministry of Education informing us that we had to remove Microsoft Office from all our Apple computers as the Microsoft School Licence Agreement had expired and was not going to be renewed.
Computerworld published an article today about it and I felt compelled to make comment.
On two matters really….
Firstly I looked for the comment link at the bottom of the article so that I could say my piece. I have been reading too many blogs in the holidays I think!!!
Secondly having to remove Word and Excel will be no loss to my eight year olds. I am not so sure about Powerpoint but as long as we get an Apple’s iWork all will be sweet in that respect.
The loss of Office in itself, may well be a blessing in disguise and further encourage people to go the Web2.0 tools as a replacement. We have already had a play with Writely- now Google Docs. Yesterday I helped a fellow teaching colleague with using RSS, Delicious, Bloglines, Gmail, Blogs etc. I didn’t take my computer with me as I had all I needed residing on the net in secure locations. Which computer I accessed the information from was irrelevant. In saying that I am still very much an Apple girl with its simplicity of use and the seamless inter-connectivity of applications.
As long as we have the required, supported, ubiquitous internet access then I’m all for it.
April 18th, 2007 at 9:00 pm
I missed that memo. Did it only apply to apple computers? What I want to know is are the MOE now going to give each school the money they were sending to Microsoft? I don’t think so!!!
April 21st, 2007 at 2:05 pm
Interesting. I can’t find any mention of this on the MoE website. However, it does say that the Microsoft agreement expired at the end of 2006 and they are ‘presently renegotiating’ (the site was last updated at the end of January.) There are times when the MoE doesn’t seem very organised! Let me know if you find out more.
April 25th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
[...] I followed an email link in an email from Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach to TechEnhancedLearning, then Allanah King’s blog (no more MS agreement for Apples!), then the MoE website (it never seems up to date!) then Podomatic, then Google Docs and then to Technorati – meaningful wandering, you know how it is!. And I thought about some of the many ways people are using the Internet to inform, influence and inspire others 24/7. [...]