Phasing out MS Office

Our school has a history of using MS Office, as do many. It’s expected. It’s normal.

It’s expensive. It also, with the age group we teach (7-13 year olds), gives the kids too much flexibility to fiddle; they like to create pretty instead of content. And their idea of pretty really isn’t pretty!

So, I want to replace it with Google Apps. We’ve got a Google Apps domain, and this is the only thing I’ve been using in IT lessons for the last 12 months.

The time has come though, to just not install MS Office on pupil accessible computers. I’ll give them OpenOffice available as a just in case, but the default option will be Google Docs.

I’m considering turning off logins too; given that all the kids’ docs are going to be in the “cloud”, there’s not much point in logging in. They’ll authenticate to the web proxy so I’ll know who they are for naughtiness purposes, and I’ll give them the ability to connect to their home directory for saving other work, e.g. sketchup, audacity, etc.

I just hope it works – I reckon it’ll take a year before they’re completely happy with the move, but I also reckon I’ll be able to save nearly £5000 a year on licensing fees.

Time to get writing a whole bunch of documentation.