Tech in the Workflow

This past October in Cartagena, Colombia, the British Council celebrated the first in a series of three annual policy conferences on the subject of English language education in the Americas. The policy dialogues are meant to stimulate frank discussion of challenges, opportunities and choices faced by policy-makers working with English language teaching and hence were not open to the general public but limited to ministers of education, regional education secretaries and their advisors. Altamente's principal research and policy advisor, Laura Gorbea was invited to the event in the capacity of  language policy advisor to the Puerto Rico Department of Education (PRDE). As a public service and at the request of the Puerto Rico Department of Education, Gorbea prepared a summary of key topics, debates and their relevance to the language education debate in Puerto Rico.

Some of the presenters and topics in this policy conference include:

• Greeting and introduction to the new English language education policy in Columbia by María Fernanda Campo Saavedra, Minister of Education
• "Education for the Future: 21st Century Skills"  - Charles Fadel
• "Education and English in teh Future" - Charles Graddol
• "English in the Early Years" - Janet Enever
• "English and Teacher Education" - John Knagg

If you would like a copy of the report on the Policy Dialogues (available only in Spanish, at present) please request it through our contact form.

We are starting to see more movement in adoption of OpenOffice. There are many reasons, but a recent article in PC Magazine, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2341228,00.asp, lists some really killer features. Pay special attention to legacy formats. Using OpenOffice one can open just about any file, DOC, XLS, PPT, old or new.

In addition, one of the things I really like about OpenOffice is the excellent support for styles and long documents. For example, instead of setting a heading as bold, 16pt type, sans serif, you define a heading style for heading 2 (h2) as bold, 16pt type, sans serif. Now, every time you start enter a heading for a new section, it will be styled the same way. To change the formatting, just go to your style window and adjust the default. All your formats are automatically updated. You can do this with any content type in your document, paragraphs, quotes, sections, bullets, etc. Although MS Office also has this feature, it is less intuitive, and not as front and center to the end user. As a result, I find that few people use it.

OpenOffice is not a step down, a crippled cheap shoddy free program that one uses only when cutting corners. No, Openoffice is an office suite full of enterprise features and robust document handling. OpenOffice is valuable at any price. It just happens to be free.  Download your copy today at: http://openoffice.org/