resources update issue 62

• Autodesk Inventor Professional
• GCSE Worksheet Wizard FRENCH
• Easiteach - Early Steps in Literacy
• Kahootz

• Health Beats: Keeping Healthy
• Art-Student.net - the Visual Literacy Database
• Junior Librarian
• Textease IdeasMap

Autodesk Inventor Professional is a sophisticated solid modelling program and should perhaps be aimed primarily at Year 10 onwards. Teachers will undoubtedly find the program useful for supporting AS/A2 level studies within design and technology. The sketching facility is the most useful tool, with its logical and intuitive ‘constraint-based’ format. Using a structured scheme with high levels of support, most students should be able to produce innovative and accurate model prototypes within two to three dedicated lessons. The program can be used to challenge a pupil’s ingenuity and to enable the production of innovative and sophisticated ‘fast-prototypes’ of their designs.

Overall Autodesk Inventor Professional is a useful piece of software, especially for those schools, which are well equipped and/or who are focusing on extending the more able.

This resource is aimed at laying the foundations for an understanding of healthy living for children between the ages of 7 and 13. Covering a wide range of information that ties in with both PSHE and the healthy eating aspects of food technology in the National Curriculum, the format is of a series of ‘interactive textbooks’ or pages that provide information on the topics of healthy eating, body health, tobacco, alcohol and other drugs, and disease prevention.

These are followed up with enjoyable educational games that allow children to check how well they know each topic. All in all, this is a novel and interesting resource that gets the message of healthy living over in a positive way, with good reinforcement of what they have learned.

GCSE Worksheet Wizard French is a CD-ROM which aims to help teachers to produce worksheets for the reading component of the GCSE examination. Also available for German and Spanish (which are on separate CD-ROMs) it is aimed at Years 10 and 11 and contains a database of 150 magazine articles which can be used as grammar, vocabulary or general reading activities. The tasks are carefully differentiated into foundation and higher level tasks and all the topics required for the GCSE exam are covered.

The aim of the exercise generator is to produce worksheets in minutes and therefore it is designed as a timesaver for teachers. It also allows teachers to import their own texts. This CD-ROM is a good tool to revise and practice reading skills and offers a wide range of tasks

Art-Student.net is an online resource created for use by teachers and students in secondary schools, sixth form colleges and further education institutions. The site is essentially a very extensive database of educational resources for developing ICT in art and design. It has been designed to meet the needs of students doing art at KS3, GCSE, AS and A2 levels. This enormous resource does seem to cover all of the schemes of work for the National Curriculum and relevant exam courses for the secondary sector and beyond.

It is targeted at students about to embark on a project to provide them with ideas and suggestions to help them prepare. I feel it would also be useful for homeworks and simply to get the students out of an art room and into an ICT suite!

Easiteach - Early Steps in Literacy

RM

Easiteach Early Steps is a content pack with resources to support interactive teaching or Foundation and Key Stage 1 Literacy. It contains ready-made materials for teaching
word, sentence and text level objectives, including interactive phonics games, songs, interactive texts and banks of pictures and sounds all aimed to develop children’s reading and writing skills. It works in conjunction with Easiteach software, enabling teachers to edit and adapt the existing resources to develop their own.

The phonics materials are helpfully linked to commonly used schemes such as Jolly Phonics and Code Breakers. In addition to the comprehensive phonics resources the package contains a number of cross curricular lesson
resources as with Red Riding Hood helping children to explore healthy eating through the contents of her basket.

This software aims to automate your school library. It makes the issuing and returning of books easy enough for children to carry out independently, allowing them to learn. They love having their own library card, operating the barcode scanner and taking it in turns to be the librarian in a very mature manner! In the background it is a valuable time-saver for teachers also automatically tracks and takes care of the issuing and returning, as well as the value and whereabouts of library stock. It will operate equally well on a single workstation as it does across a school-wide network.

Junior Librarian has certainly had a positive effect on our library users as has motivated children to develop library skills and read more books. The system even produces
clear statistics reports ready for an Ofsted inspector!

Kahootz is essentially a 3D multimedia program for children that is designed to encourage creativity and exploration. It does this by enabling children to use a variety
of simple tools to create their own virtual worlds. These can include a wide range of supplied objects and backgrounds, as well as different animations and sounds. Children can write stories and add text to their created environments. They can then link their scenes together and use various tools to navigate through their created world. Whilst it is essentially cross-curricular, it could be used to support a variety of curriculum areas including art, design technology, maths and science. The clearly designed user interface consists of a variety of tools for developing different scenes
and adding people and objects.

Textease IdeasMap helps students to organise information in several ways; a skill that is not dependent on software but can be useful for note taking and learning away from the
computer. Alternatively maps can be created to review learning and provide a useful assessment tool. It is designed for use from KS1 upwards.

The Textease toolbar and an introductory demonstration video give clear instructions for use with exemplars providing ideas in science, art, maths and humanities. Complex ideas can be recorded with a combination of text, graphics, colours and designs. The map can be further
enhanced with pictures, sounds, digital photos and video clips to illustrate the diagram. The program is flexible and mind maps can be created as a more traditional chart can be created or a flow chart in order to illustrate a process.

What are the total costs of the resource?
• Check whether there’s a telephone helpline and if technical support is free.
• Are there built-in tutorials, or does the manufacturer offer training? Is this included in the price, or is there an extra charge?
• Don’t forget to include the cost of teaching time spent on training.
• Check if there is on-screen help or a printed manual to support installation and use of the product.
• What is the lifespan of the product? Is the cost a one-off outlay or a recurrent charge such as an annual subscription? If it’s a CD-ROM, will you receive updates free of charge?
• Will you run the product on the school network? Check if you need to buy a multi-user licence.