Let’s face it. We live in a Microsoft-dominated world. Our computers use a Microsoft operating system(Windows) and most of us use Microsoft productivity tools (Office). But believe it or not, there was actually a world before Microsoft. More importantly, there will be a world AFTER Microsoft, too.

How do I know? Because everywhere we turn innovative new companies and individuals are coming up with truly wonderful (and much less expensive) alternatives to Microsoft products. An example is this week’s website of the week, Google Docs. With this free service, you can create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. AND it allows you to easily share files and collaborate with others. Everything is then stored online – no thumb drives or floppies needed!

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t really have anything against Microsoft. However, I do think competition is a good thing!

For more information and ideas on how you might use Google Docs with your students, contact your friendly ITRT!

The other day I was asked the question, “How do students download Word documents from SchoolFusion if they don’t have MS Word installed on their home computer?”

What a great question! A lot of our students are using other, less expensive, word processing alternatives.

To help these kids out, you can save your Word documents as “rich text format”, or .rtf. That will retain most of the formatting and is recognized by most word processing applications.