10 janvier 2008

Of surprise when teaching IT to the young kids in the 21st century

I do love « IT » even in my personal life. So far that I did accept to teach my oldest boy (10 years old) class on a Saturday.

I was ready for a 386 computer for twelve kids , a crappy MS Dos and children only ready to play with it…as we dealy hear that public schools are so poor. I was so wrong.

They had a Dell Computer for two kids and all of them networked to a laser printer ! So 12 computers whith flat panel screen running the very last MS Windows XP.

Then I discovered that children had to follow a very strict program : being able to correct a poem , colorize it , and then print it. Teacher was only there for spelling correction ! They were working with the very last Open Office writer !

I was thinking of the billions that companies’re still paying for MS Word to write simple letters…

Then I saw most of the kids jumping, once poem printed -without any help- on the fantastic Google Earth tool and sharing all together they summer vacation localization… still without any help ;-)

Here are the future generations : how’ll they fit in companies where internet access is prohibited and MS Word is still a standard tool for daily work ?

PS last night I had to help a father with a 12 years old girl blogging ! That achieved me !!...

07 janvier 2008

Of new year personnal IT resolutions

Happy New Year and Best wishes to all readers for this new Year 2008 .

Here are my IT resolutions for 2k8 : It's around two months since I didn't post and will try to do it better this year. Then , as you can see, I'll try to only post in English to improve my writen english level...

and finally I'll probably completely switch all my online work to Zoho. I tested it for several applications last year and I'm convinced it's nice work there. See How many application they already have online , it's amazing to me :
I'm already using wiki for maintaining a website rules (shared with owner) of wourse writer (for last Christmas lists...) and will probably move there all my Google Docs.

PS
I'll also probably give to end user the first Ubuntu computer... as MS Windows is too big on it ! I'll install the 7.10 release and will come back for installation issues and end user feed-back...