March 2001 Online Newsletter for Greater Essex County Computer Using Professionals

Remember from last month that ubiquitous means "Being or seeming to be everywhere at the same time." There's more to it than just having computers and software there. It's got to work. When you look at the current numbers of Ministry licensed software, it totals over 200 individual titles. Dare I say it's a whack of software? Some of the software runs beautifully, without a hiccup. Other software titles seems to have troubles no matter what you try to do. If you do an internet search, you'll find that all kinds of places have standards in place for developing educational web sites. But, there are no standards for the development of educational software. There are attempts to describe what good software looks like. There are attempts to talk about screen layouts, warnings about repetitive stress disorders, and the like. What about just basically describing what it's going to take to get the software installed, functional, and then have it run reliably for months. Nothing. In fact, it seems that most pieces of software were intended to run on a machine with no recognition that it might eventually have to run on a computer with a secure desktop or that you might have to redirect student created files to a home directory on a fileserver somewhere within the building. These are the things that test the mettle of a computer technician. It's why we all cheer when we get software like the products from Courseware Solutions. The company was created specifically with education in mind. The software isn't intended to change the universe. Best of all, the stars don't have to be in perfect alignment in order for the software to work. It just does. Composed of a single executable file and related data, you can install it virtually anywhere, on any network, point to the executable and it does its job. Over the years, we've seen Mathville, Mathville Junior, Mathville 1,2,3, Ski Quations, and now Kidway, Jungleway, and Speedway from this company. The software works, is very specific about the students that it attempts to address, and never seems to need mending. Every day, more computers are put into schools on student desktops and we're asked to make their use ubiquitous. There isn't an increase in the amount of technical support that's available. Those things are fixed. What we need are more pieces of software that are reliable and work without hitch. We need software developers that are sensitive to the needs of our classrooms and write accordingly.