(believe it or not) through some decent products.
Which products do you think are good, why do you think they are good? Also do you still think they are good for the environment of a school.
I think MS Office is a good suite. It is well designed, works fairly well and gets kids using computers at an early age with a simple interface. IMHO kids need something that is simple to use and works as they expect it, and Office is pretty much this way. Also...most other office suites have pretty much replicated the interface (which is good IMHO). Yes it is expensive and yes it is closed and yes it is proprietary, but I am looking at the interface and the featureset here.
IME quite a lot of the featureset of Office can case a lot of problems in schools. It's quite possible to change drastically how Word works simply by altering the "Autocorrect" settings. e.g. suddently a word processor becomes a subsitution cypher machine. This is a major flaw IMHO with a lot of Microsoft's software it comes with "features" which are hardly ever used. But can quite easily create havoc, either from the the POV of suddenly changing the way something works or in the case of IE, IIS, OE creating a "back door" through which you could taxi a 747. Whilst looking superficially similar Star Office appears somewhat better at making the key functions easily available. -- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763