A free alternative to Office - LibreOffice

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 One of the most used programs is surely 'Office'. Knowing that most students have financial difficulties to buy this and other programs, we offer a free and open source program – LibreOffice.

 LibreOffice (LO), does not only provide the same services but more. Have a look at the drawing features where it offers a program for drawing and not just a few features for drawing! See Illustration 2.

Mathematics teachers should be proud as they have their own program in LO too. Have a look at illustration 3.

I know what you're thinking….but all my friends use Microsoft Office. How can I work on the same files? Yes of course you can! When working in LO one can save in various formats and you can still read files of other programs such as office. See illustration 1.

Illustration 1

Illustration 2

  

Illustration 3

Saving your favourite websites (bookmarks)

Many teachers are busy preparing their lessons which includes bookmarking interesting educational sites. They never give a thought of copying all their material onto a pen drive or a portable hard disk. All of a sudden they see the blue screen of death or a virus on their laptops….and they start to panic when they realise that their work could disappear forever. Here we are giving some very easy steps to follow in order to copy the bookmarks found on your browser.

This should be an incentive to use free and open source programs which are able to stand up such threats especially in the life of a teacher where students are encouraged to share their presentations in front of the class. Consequently the threat of getting a virus is much higher than in the life of other people using the internet. 

Firefox

Go to bookmarks (top of the browser)

Show all bookmarks

Click on Import and Backup (very top)

Click on Backup...

Select where to put the file….

or you can use:

Export Bookmarks to HTML (I prefer this one!)

Chrome

In the top-right corner of the browser window, click the Chrome menu (you have sort of 4 horizontal lines)

Select Bookmarks,

then Bookmark Manager

Click on the Organize menu in the manager

Select Export bookmarks

How to Import

If you want to import them into another computer, then you only need to follow the same instructions for both browsers. This time, select import instead of export.