Article Categories    •   Classroom Teaching    •   Teaching With Technology

A Step Towards the Creation of Educational Technology Standards

Software Use In Schools

It is pretty obvious that whatever piece of software students learn today will be totally obsolete in as little as two years. So why even teach using software at all? However, there are five applications that are currently the backbone of business today and they are sure to stick around. In order to better prepare students for the workplace, the following can be considered:

1) Operating Systems

Windows-based systems are the business industry standard. Who's to say what OS businesses will be running in the future. Students will need to learn the importance of an Operating System and how to manipulate it to their benefit.

2) Office Suites

Office suites are really a "group" of programs; in the past six years that definition of office has often changed. In the mid 90s, an 'office suite' was considered to be a group of programs that allowed for word processing, spread sheets, and sometimes, database entry. The term 'office suite' has grown to include web design software, presentation software, page layout design, and in some cases, graphic editors.

Office suites are key pieces of productivity software that every business oriented career is centered around. It is imperative that all students know the basic operation of these programs.

It seems that Microsoft Office seems to be the clear leader in the office suite category with Corel Word Perfect Office suite a distant second. When deciding what suite to go with, cost is usually the main issue. Schools will generally shy away from MS Office because of cost factors. However, whatever office suite used, we recommend using an older version. These versions are usually very cost effective and software manufactures only make minor changes between versions.

3) Page Layout Design Programs

This genre of software allows you to manipulate and create hard copy documents. Most educators are quick to jump at using professional quality Page Layout Programs, usually Adobe Page Maker or Quark. It some cases, this may be the correct choice if you are teaching students high end printing techniques.

In the working world, future employees will need to use these programs daily to communicate their message, but the software applications of the future will make this much easier. Broderbund, among many others, has a fantastic software package for page layout entitled "Print Shop." While this application is not the most powerful tool for this task, it is easy to use and learners pick it up quickly. Expect to see this level of software to show up in the workplace.

4) Web Editors

These are programs that make web pages without any programming knowledge. Currently, the standard language for the web is Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). The modern web editors allow you to design a web page as if you were making a document in a word processor and then it converts that document to HTML so that it can be viewed on the web.

There is a great deal of controversy as to which web editor is the industry standard. A great number of reviewers claim Microsoft's FrontPage heads above the rest. More and more, Macromedia's Dream Weaver series is gaining recognition because it is an application that is extremely powerful and supports most web browsers with ease. Adobe's GoLive is also an excellent application that works extremely well when designing graphic intensive web sites.

As time passes, a new standard web language will come of age and replace HTML. Web editors will readily adapt to this and will still work in a similar fashion that they do now, but just write it into a different language. In the future, employees at most Fortune 500 companies will be expected to communicate on and over the web. Using a web editor will be common place.

>Next Page