"Two years ago, my daughter, a high school freshman, was working on her social studies project and she told me I had to go out and buy Microsoft Office. At that time, I worked for Sun Microsystems so I used StarOffice and insisted that my whole family use it. I asked to see her homework assignment.
"The assignment looked as if it was a study guide written for the school by Microsoft. The requirement was for the students to do a presentation and on each page, they would use a function that was built into Power Point.
"The first issue I had was that I did not believe that this exercise helped my daughter learn social studies. The second issue was that I don't believe the school has any right telling the students what software they had to use to prepare their homework assignments. I wrote a letter to the school and met with the administrators. The administrators assured me that it was not the school's policy to dictate what software a student used..."
