Chris Betcher

Like many schools around the world, our school has used the Microsoft Office trio of Word, Excel and PowerPoint for many years. Most of us know Word, Excel and PowerPoint well enough for our daily tasks. Although some of us might be willing to admit we probably don't use it to its full capacity, we've been using it for so long that we don't stop to think much about what, if any, alternatives might be out there. Don't get me wrong, Microsoft Office is an amazing piece of software. Like you, I've grown up with it and watched it evolve over many versions and seen lots of features get added over the years. If you really know what you're doing with Word, PowerPoint or Excel, you can make documents that are quite amazing in their complexity. And then along comes GoogleDocs, or Drive as we now call it. From humble beginnings as an online word processor called Writely , the Google Drive system has also evolved and changed and grown over the years. Sure, it's not the...

When I lived in Canada for a while, I was always a little bemused by the Canadian approach to speed limits. The maximum allowed speed limit on the QEW and the 400-series roads around Toronto is 100km/h and yet if you actually do that speed you just about get run over. The locals routinely cruise the highways there at 120-130km/h and there's no issue. I like to drive fast too, but it used to frustrate my sense of logic when I'd ask my Canadian friends why they didn't observe the speed limit. "Oh, it says 100," they'd say, "but nobody actually drives at 100, we drive at 120." "Why don't they just raise the speed limit to 120", I'd ask. "Because then people would just do 140" came the reply. Apart from being a really strange view of human nature, I'd then ask, "Why don't you just post the speed limit that you actually want people to observe and then enforce that, instead of having this vague gray area where peopl...