Richard Shearer is the director of technology for the Wynnewood School District in Oklahoma. For several years, with the support of his superintendent, Richard has switched many of the desktop computers utilized by students from commercial productivity software to the free, open-source software package “Open Office.” From a financial standpoint, this decision has saved the school district thousands of dollars and proven to be a highly functional software solution for district computing requirements. In this podcast, Richard discusses the reasons his district has embraced Open Office and open source software, the cost savings, the software suite’s capabilities and limitations, as well as hardware requirements. Richard’s message to other technology directors considering open source solutions is: Be brave! Just do it! 🙂
Program Length: 11 min, 12 sec
File size: 2.7 MB
- Open Office
- Dan Schmit’s book NeoOffice (Open Office for Macintosh)
- K12 OpenSource Webcasts
- OpenOffice.org Interview: First Choice for Some Schools Now? from K12 OpenSource Webcasts
- UberCaster (podcasting software for Macintosh)
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Note: As of 1 Oct 2026, this is a FULL STATIC COPY of all 6,390 posts shared on this blog since 2003. Updated content and ideas from Wes Fryer are still available!
Comments
One response to “Podcast83: Why Rent Productivity Software When You Can Own It For Free?”
I have been switching from MS Office to Open Office. Everything was going great until I read Doug Belshaw’s recent post (20 Ideas) on using timers. The timer Doug uses runs in MS Excel and probably uses Visual Basic. Having this timer not work is the only glitch I have run into in switching to Open Office. I have yet to find an open source countdown timer. May be someone can do a little Java magic to make a timer for everyone.