Anyhow, I’ve had a cursory glance around the program I use the most – Word – and the changes are subtle, but potentially good news for ICT teachers. The UI remains pretty much the same; still based around the ribbon (which I like, I know some don’t). In fact, the biggest difference is that the circular Office logo is now the first tab in the ribbon… no big deal:

The first real difference I found was in the Insert menu. There’s now a Screenshot feature that allows the user to insert a screenshot of any open window directly into Word, without the need to to printscreen & paste. Alright, not a huge improvement, but what is is the fact that it will take screenshots of small windows without the need to crop them down. Anyone who’s ever taught GCSE ICT will know the royal pain in the ass that is screenshotting, so this is in my book an excellent addition.

The screenshot menu.

Inserting a screenshot of iTunes.

Inserting a small screenshot of the character menu from Photoshop.

The next new feature I found was the artistic effects menu for formatting pictures. It basically offers the default effects from Photoshop… I can see this becoming the new rainbow coloured WordArt as the bane of my life in KS3 lessons. On the topic of WordArt, though, my year 7s will be pleased to see the new WordArt available in PowerPoint 2007 is now available in Word 2010 – they never quite understood why it wasn’t in Word 2007.

Finally, the File menu now looks completely different, encompassing all the options it used to link to.

The best improvement here is in the print menu, which now combines print preview with the print options menu in a far more user friendly format:

So so far, after half an hour’s play, all seems well. More steps in the right direction when it comes to usability & a polished interface, and I’m not surprised there weren’t more changes as I can’t really think of much else that would be needed. I’m no card-carrying Microsoft fan, but I think they’ve got a lot right with both Windows 7 and what I’ve seen so far of Office 2010. Whether you love them or hate them, better software from the Microsoft camp encourages better software from their competitors, so it can’t be a bad thing.

I’ve been talking with @mwclarkson and @dagza about the out of touch way software companies are gouging schools for licensing fees (I studied at the Daily Mail school of impartiality, I did). The general feeling is that if our kids leave school competent in (for example) Photoshop, Fireworks & Dreamweaver, that surely has to be a big win for Adobe. Okay, they’re the market leader anyway, but with Open Source alternatives slowly eating into their market share, doesn’t it make sense to reevaluate the pricing of products for education?

My school has a site license (~100 computers) for Adobe CS3. In that, we get Acrobat, After Effects, Bridge, Contribute, Dreamweaver, Encore, Fireworks, Flash, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Premiere & Soundbooth. Great. Except we’re missing Captivate and Presenter – possibly the two Adobe products best suited to education (screencasting & quiz presentation), and of the ones we have, we only use Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, Illustrator & Photoshop in any significant way.

When a school is going to spend thousands of pounds on software, why should we have to fit with the standard packages released for personal & business use? What would make more sense is for Adobe to release an education Master Collection, including the most commonly-used Adobe products for education. Hell, what would be better would be a mix & match approach – it’s 2009, after all, why shouldn’t schools get to choose the products they want rather than simply what’s on offer?

Maybe it’s too much to hope that the “freemium” business model would spill over into education (okay, bad example – I don’t want adverts in my classroom), but I’d have hoped things would be more flexible than they appear to be right now.

Adobe Presenter is a nifty plugin for Microsoft PowerPoint that allows presentations to be exported as a Flash movie (iSpring does this for free – thanks to @twowhizzy for the link), but the big plus is that it allows for the creation of interactive quizzes, the answers to which can be exported into a spreadsheet for analysis & review. I know I could use it in my teaching to good effect.

Yet in January at the excellent BETT show at the London Olympia, we were wowed by a comprehensive, well-prepared, well-targeted presentation that showed off the features of this handy little app, then when we asked “how much?”, the otherwise very helpful Adobe staff were struck dumb. Nobody knew. After about 45 minutes of hanging around, we were told we could get it as a bundle with Acrobat 9 Pro Extended for £125 per computer (including education & bulk discount)- remember I said we have 100, earlier on… remember also that we have Acrobat 8 Pro.

Seriously, Adobe, get with it. I’d love to use this, and I’m the kind of person who would spread the word about it, but if I went to the bursar with a request for £12,500 for a really nifty little program, I’d get laughed out of the room. In fact, knowing The One Who Holds The Purse Strings as I do, I’d probably have a shoe thrown at me.

It’s time for a rethink of education licensing… in getting your software into schools you’re preparing a workforce to use them. I don’t particularly care whether I’m pumping yet more money into the hands of big corporations, I want my kids to be prepared to use industry-standard software. I want to know that I’m using the best possible tool for the job, and you want that tool to be yours – so stop making it so bloody difficult to get your software into the classroom.