Thing 18

I started to download Open Office, but when the progress box showed that the download was going to take over an hour and I was down to only 11 minutes of battery left, I abandoned that idea. That's one major disadvantage...although I noticed that one could request a cd for installation. I'm making an assumption here, but I'm going to guess that although the product is free, that part of the 'price' would include more requests for donations to support the work. I don't have a problem with paying for a product that I'm going to use...I'd rather just pay the $$$ than be repeatedly hit up for donations for something that is advertised as free. I experimented with Google Docs and I can see lots of potential for its use in my situation. It would be great to share items that have been created by other librarians in my district so that we are not each individually reinventing the wheel each time we need a spreadsheet, parent letter, schedule, etc. There has been some discussion, as well, about using Google Docs to rewrite our policy and procedure manual. I think that would be a great way to work on such a monumental task...many hands make the work light, wisdom of the masses and all that. I doubt that I'll be uploading everything from my files, but it's nice to know that I can do that as needed in order to share with colleagues, etc. I noticed on the items that I did upload that there doesn't seem to be the capability to include clip art and/or pictures, so there would need to be some additional tweaking done after the collaborative work was complete. All in all, I have to say that this is another great tool that I look forward to using and sharing with my colleagues when school resumes next month!