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New Teacherish Software
Jan. 5th, 2005 08:30 pmI have just discovered (as in, before leaving school today) the most wonderful education software I've seen in a while.
Boiled down, it's a flowchart program. It has a bunch of different shapes in a bunch of different colours, it lets you change the colours, and it comes with dozens of templates to start from. When you've made the flowchart you want, you can click on "outline" at the bottom of the screen and get the text from your shapes, neatly organized in classic outline format. You can then export the whole deal to a Word doc of your choice. I spent nearly half an hour playing with this thing, looking at some of the templates, doing silly flowcharts to show my kids, etc, etc. The only bug I've been able to find, while serious, is still get-around-able: it's impossible to start a fresh document. You have to choose a template, select all and delete, in order to have access to the menu of shapes.
There's a rather wonky clipart selection, but it's possible (apparently - I didn't get this far) to import other images. You can also change the connectors between the bubbles from the standard arrows to sprays of hearts, globes, stars - there are about four screens of choices. It's really cool.
I'm going to use a Big Book from our book room tomorrow, about the Solar System, to introduce this program. I figure they can do a really simple research project outline in Smart Ideas (that's the name of this wonderful program, btw) and then transfer it to a Word doc and add in the detail and sentences. I doubt we'll have time to do more than play with it - but playing is fun!
My next job is to find a way to get this program on my home computer - "for teacher use", after all. It's licensed to the Board, which means I can use it at home. I love copyright. :)
Boiled down, it's a flowchart program. It has a bunch of different shapes in a bunch of different colours, it lets you change the colours, and it comes with dozens of templates to start from. When you've made the flowchart you want, you can click on "outline" at the bottom of the screen and get the text from your shapes, neatly organized in classic outline format. You can then export the whole deal to a Word doc of your choice. I spent nearly half an hour playing with this thing, looking at some of the templates, doing silly flowcharts to show my kids, etc, etc. The only bug I've been able to find, while serious, is still get-around-able: it's impossible to start a fresh document. You have to choose a template, select all and delete, in order to have access to the menu of shapes.
There's a rather wonky clipart selection, but it's possible (apparently - I didn't get this far) to import other images. You can also change the connectors between the bubbles from the standard arrows to sprays of hearts, globes, stars - there are about four screens of choices. It's really cool.
I'm going to use a Big Book from our book room tomorrow, about the Solar System, to introduce this program. I figure they can do a really simple research project outline in Smart Ideas (that's the name of this wonderful program, btw) and then transfer it to a Word doc and add in the detail and sentences. I doubt we'll have time to do more than play with it - but playing is fun!
My next job is to find a way to get this program on my home computer - "for teacher use", after all. It's licensed to the Board, which means I can use it at home. I love copyright. :)