Editorial

After reading Mike Lawrence’s article, Smells like Ed Tech, I’m wondering if ed tech hitting the mainstream is a good thing…

Podcast: Download (Duration: 5:35 — 7.8MB)

For most of last month, I was without a computer. After two trips to the Apple Store and a new logic board, I finally have a working laptop. During the process, some “Genius” erased my hard drive. It was backed up, but that meant I would need to reinstall everything.

It was easy enough to install the operating system and migrate my user data (aka documents). After some geeky advice, I decided to manually install every application. This gave me the rare opportunity to look at what applications I actually use. And I decided:

Microsoft Office will not be on my laptop.

I use Google Drive for most of my basic word processing and spreadsheeting, and I use Pages (Apple’s iWork) for more involved documents. I don’t need Word or Excel any longer. You might be thinking I forgot to mention PowerPoint. I didn’t.

If someone emails me a .docx file, I can import it and convert it into a Google Doc. If they insist, I can export it as a .docx. I’m thinking that if we are emailing back and forth, we should just be using a Google Doc anyway.

I’ll let you know how it goes. For the record, I’m not anti-Office. I honestly believe I just don’t need it anymore. I’ll be keeping track of how often I think I need Office or iWork. I have a feeling the answer will be not too often.