• EXP Maths 7
• Literacy World Interactive Fiction
• QuickSearch Interactive Wordsearch Maker for Schools

• Oxford Reference Online: Premium Collection
  
• Magic Grandad's Seaside Holidays
• Tell a Tale 2

EXP Maths 7

This new maths software provides a comprehensive series of interactive activities aimed at KS3 year 7 maths students, covering algebra, number, shape, space and measures, and handling data.

All the activities are cross-referenced to the National Numeracy Strategy, and are fully supported by easily accessible teacher lesson notes and activities for the starter, main and plenary. Most of the activities have several levels allowing differentiation and progression. Topics are revisited throughout the scheme of enabling students to develop their understanding of each topic; for example it contains a highly realistic set of geometry
tools, which enables geometric constructions to be created easily with the minimum of experience.

Oxford Reference Online is a huge and comprehensive resource that contains over 120 dictionaries and reference titles covering the complete subject spectrum including: general reference, language, science, medicine, humanities, social sciences, business and professional. Oxford Reference Online incorporates language and subject reference works from one of the world’s biggest reference publishers into a single cross-searchable resource, whose interface is intuitive and caters for all abilities. The Premium Collection builds on the original Core Collection with an extra range of titles. This is a particularly useful tool for students who are carrying out research projects, as it links to the National Curriculum. The explanations are clear, concise and there are links for further information. Key words are also highlighted and this will help improve literacy.

Read full evaluation of Oxford Reference Online: Premium Collection

Literacy World Interactive is designed to make literacy lessons richer, more interactive and motivating for all the children in the class. It provides a format that will encourage whole-class discussion and develop shared reading and writing. It also supports individual working through the use of accompanying tasks and independent activities.

The program offers a wealth of resources from electronic Big Book texts and activities plus additional video clips, to texts and images that are all linked specifically to the learning objectives outlined in the NLS and to the units of work in the Literacy World Teaching and Planning Guides. These are all really high quality and contain work from a number of well-known popular authors. They are presented in a clear and accessible format that engages children particularly when used on an IWB.

In this interactive CD-ROM children are led on a unique historical journey to seaside holidays of the 1900’s, 1950s and present times by the friendly character of (from the BBC) Magic Grandad.

The Click and Explore section provides an ideal introduction to the Seaside Holiday topic and a starting point to begin an exploration of the past. There is plenty of relevant material from the wealth of resources available, which include video clips, photographs and artefacts.

Children can work on specific tasks or they can explore the resources independently. Other excellent features include the teachers options, allowing you to customise the content for your class, and the printable Pupil’s Books to record children’s work.

QuickSearch Interactive Wordsearch Maker 4.0 is a dual-purpose program for teachers and pupils. It is an invaluable resource to enable teachers to make high quality and professional word searches tailored to their subject and group. It has easy to use functions and menus as well as providing prepared, editable word lists for common primary and secondary school subject areas.

It can also be used by children themselves to create and share their own wordsearches either to print or for others to solve on screen.

There is also a function that enables a child to copy and paste their wordsearch to another program. Further functions include four levels of difficulty, a hint option for encouragement, spell checker, prepared word lists under topic titles (including French), clip art pictures and interactive cloze procedures.

Tell a Tale 2 enables early readers to practice and develop their reading skills by writing a 3 sentence story using a simple interface. The stories have an opening, a location, an actor and an action. Each phrase is spoken and its speed can be altered. There are three levels of differentiation which the teacher can select according to their judgement of where the child is at.

The child selects the phrase they wish to use and the chosen phrase is put in a text box to build up their story. The graphics are colourful and animated giving life to the story thus engaging the children in their learning. There are also a series of worksheets which come with the software which could be used in numerous ways.

From: A strategy for spending eLCs

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