One of the frustrations that teachers have had at the beginning of the school was transitioning from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice (or any open source office solution of their choice). The long short of it is this. Teachers have poured hundreds of hours into lesson plans, materials, presentations using Microsoft Office and when you open these resources in LibreOffice the formatting can be different. In some cases the formatting is only off by a little bit. In other cases it will take just as long to recreate the whole thing as opposed to fixing it. On the other hand spending $100 per teacher on Office every year is just not smart business and supporting open source projects (like LibreOffice) is good for competition and extremely responsible when it comes to the IT budget.
Well I think I have a solution. If you use Microsoft’s SkyDrive you can upload your PowerPoints, Word documents and more and it will show exactly as you typed it out (at least so far in my testing). If you’re too busy to do this, think of it as backing up your data to a secure place and having access to all those document in any classroom with Internet (in our case that’s nearly every room in our school). Read on past the break to see how to do this. Spoiler: It’s pretty darn easy. If you have your own solution or comment be sure to leave it below. We love comments at IT Babble.
Technology in the Classroom 