PUBLIC MOVES

Are you a morning or evening person? Do you take hours in the shower? Or in the dressing room? Do you eat rather slowly? Is your house too far from school that commuting or the traffic makes you often come to class late?
Be honest in the self-test. What things take much time from your studying? Do you do the marketing and cooking at home? Or watch your younger siblings? Do you need to develop speed reading? Or are your friends often with you and you have to exert mighty efforts all the time just to leave or send them away when you must study?

Many years ago before the dawn of the internet age a company dominated the word processing market. Wordperfect was the standard in most businesses that used word processing. Then another powerhouse entered the market in 1995 and there was a significant shift in the business market to Microsoft Office. Quite honestly at that time Microsoft had a little better package available for business and Businesses converted in masses and never looked back. Should they? In the title wave of Microsoft dominance, Wordperfect now owned by Corel has been responding by pushing invasion to make a better product and reducing there price to make an office suite more affordable. Has all of this work been enough to catch up to Microsoft. Well in sales no, but when it comes to the quality and value of the product, I think they have.
I am reasonably adept at Microsoft Office, and personally love the enhancements in Office 2007. I have not used Wordperfect in 10 years, So I thought that I could not give a fair comparison to the products since Corel Wordperfect X3 is so new to me. I was wrong. Within 5 Minutes on Corel Wordperfect X3 I knew I was using a far superior tool than Microsoft Office 2007. I was doing advanced formating of a document with tables, photos, dynamic links, within 20 minutes without even referring to the help menu. I have used Corel Wordperfect X3 for about 4 days and can not ever see me going back to the miserable limitations of Microsoft word. Unfortunately my trial version runs out in about three weeks, and I’ll have to pay for my copy, but with the reasonable price point I have no problem with the change. There ya go Corel your market share just went up .00001% Another small step in the right direction.

There are now many applications in the Education field, from apps that teach times tables, to colors. I use “Preschool Adventure” with my 3 year old son and he loves it. For teaching my daughter Multiplication I use miTables. There are now many more apps for that are equally helpful. As of this writing there is a noticeable gap in Grading software, as well as student management, but we are only a few months into the development of apps. I suspect that it won’t be long before the gaps are filled.
It is obvious that even with the recent price drop it is impractical to order a class set, but in my case I have three computers and groups of four students for centers. I now use my iPod Touch as an additional computer and the students switch which computer activity they use. I also use the calculator on my document projector because it is easier to see than the student calculators. My uses are quickly expanding, and I will likely purchase a separate one with teacher funds to get even more use out of it.