Now that Microsoft is on board with cloud computing, whats holding the rest of us back?
About five years ago, I lamented to my then-IT coordinator that I wished there was another alternative to having students use Microsoft Word (or Appleworks, for that matter) in the school buildings. The problem, and it was frequent, was that once a student’s class period was over, they had no idea what to do with unfinished work. Sure, there was a school server bank that all students had access to, but then what? Some students had flash drives to save to, but then what? If the student were to save to the school server, it would remain locked at school, keeping that student from ever really owning it, and certainly from ever working on it from home. If the student saved it to a flash drive, it was frequently the case that the student did not have the same version of the program on their home computer, creating a new set of problems. My colleague, now a district coordinator, remarked that there were some online versions of word processors students could use. We tried a few with little su
