Reviews

Find Out & Write About review
Literacy and Learning, March/April 2002

Find Out and Write About Explorers and Find Out and Write About Dinosaurs are two more support discs for the very popular Clicker 4 software from Crick. Most teachers have used Clicker, but for those who haven't here's a brief description.

Clicker is a very simple idea well executed. Children who find it hard to type (or spell) can click on a word in a grid that appears at the bottom of the screen, so that the word pops into their word processor. This is an invaluable support for children with special needs as well as those who are just starting to write. Clicker also provides a great deal of additional support to children through computer speech, pictures and symbols.

The Find Out and Write About series extends the Clicker idea into a fully developed curriculum resource. It combines simple reference material with writing frames. In the Explorers software, for example, information on Marco Polo is presented in short illustrated sentences which can be read or listened to. Difficult words are linked to a glossary. Clicking on the pencil and paper' icon takesyou to aword-processor page. Here clauses from these sentences appear in a grid at the bottom. A child can reconstruct the sentences by clicking on these phrases, or type in additional material with support.

The user can navigate through the material and return at any time to the word processor to add more information in the form of text or pictures. This is a very powerful and useful idea. Navigation is very straightforward, using the common conventions of web pages.

Find Out and Write About Dinosaurs works in a similar way, with reference materials about each dinosaur, linked glossaries and word-processing pages. This disc also presents the material at three different levels in three books'. Each level has more detail and a higher reading level.

Andrew Rudd, business.virgin.net/sound.houses

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