PlonkerPoint

[Judy Perry]

Richmond,

I'm catching up on emails and I was reading this email while allowing my 
students to work in small groups on their final project, and when I read 
your definition of IT I literally laughed out loud.  The week before I did 
a lecture on computerized voting machines, known as DREs, and as I was 
looking at the "slides" in thumbnail view, I couldn't see that I'd 
actually spelled it out.  Not knowing that, I googled DRE to make certain. 
Top result? Dr. Dre.  Next different result?  Digital Rectal Examination. 
Its been a humorous 7 days at work.

I positively loathe it whenever I hear of K-12, especially K-6, students 
being forced to use PPT.  Fortunately, that hasn't happened yet with my 
kids as the billions of US dollars spent to put 3 to 5 crappy 
semi-functional Dells into every classroom don't really ever get used.

Larry Cuban's book "Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom" 
(http://www.hull.ac.uk/php/edskas/Cuban%20article%20-%20oversold.pdf) is 
unfortunately a pretty damning indictment.

Oh, and be happy that your IT moron wasn't asking you how to install 
Microsoft Encarta.  Now, THAT's a real turd.

Judy

On Sat, 19 Mar 2011, Richmond wrote:

<snip>

> Powerpoint does command . . .
>
> My 2 boys have to 'do' presentations for school, and, as we run a 100% 
> Microsoft-clean
> environment at home (well, except for the box that Daddy hides under the bed 
> with Windows
> XP for Beta testing his "Sanskrit nonsense" - see what I mean about 
> 'all-pervasive) they are forced,
> to use either OOO Present or LibreOffice to produce Powerpoint compatible 
> slide-shows to
> run on the crappy machines at school.
>
> The "IT" teacher at their school (who rang me up once because he didn't know 
> how to install
> an Encyclopedia Britannica DVD on their machines) won't let the boys run a 
> Livecode standalone
> for Windows from a CD or a USB stick. And, bye-the-bye; in the 
> English-speaking section of
> Plovdiv English Language School (my boys are in the German section) "IT" 
> stands for "It's Turd".

<snip>