K12 Schools Must Fill Need For Digital Media Skills
There is a new urgency to teach digital media literacy as a study finds students are taking online information for granted
SOLO's Writing Coach, part of the SOLO Literacy Suite, was designed to support struggling learners in any writing curriculum in a school or district's Title I or IDEA initiative through the use of a reading and writing scaffolding technology. It offers a Response to Intervention solution and guides educators to teach key writing strategies of summary writing, goal setting and paragraph writing. It includes three lesson books, a CD with writing assignments for independent practice, an administrator's walk-through and a step-by-step implementation guide.
Proofwriter is designed for high school and college students; its online writing tool helps them check and revise their written work and build essential skills to become better writers. It uses a patented e-rater scoring engine to provide students with almost instant feedback on key elements of writing, such as grammar, mechanics, word usage and writing style. It can be accessed from any computer with Internet access and gives students the option to review highlighted errors, make revisions and resubmit their work for additional feedback.
Mimio's new series of interactive whiteboards delivers both wireless and USB cable connection options. Interactive technology is built into the frame, housed in a heavy-duty but service-accessible anodized aluminum housing, making the board less susceptible to impact or abrasion damage, which can impair the performance of boards that use touch-sensitive technology embedded in the board surface. Users have full control of all computer functions, applications, online resources and documents directly from the whiteboard using the mouse interactive stylus. Display sizes range from 78 inches to 111 inches.
Phonemic Awareness Pre-K1 Phonological Understanding Program
Materials, $199
Phonemic Awareness is a supplemental pre-K1 program that teaches phonemic awareness. It contains 110 lessons featuring activities that follow the developmental sequence for teaching all levels of phonological awareness. It targets sound and word discrimination, rhyming, sentence segmentation, syllable blending, and segmentation and blending of phonemes. Each lesson includes between two and seven activities that take approximately 15 minutes to complete. Each focuses on a specific skill, and each skill gradually increases in difficulty. When a skill is first introduced, teachers explicitly model the task. Children then try the tasks on their own, receiving specific feedback.
Software, $15 per CD, $7 per workbook, and $25 per teacher's guide
The Musical Mathematics CD integrates music into learning mathematics. The songs help children understand the meaning of multiplication and how it relates to other operations such as addition, subtraction, and division. Teachers can also expand children's learning through movement, manipulatives, diagrams and writing. Educators can use Skip Counting, which features multiplication facts, as well as other pilot features during instruction to support the various mathematics content areas in number and operations, algebra, geometry, measurement, and data analysis and probability. The program also comes with instructional guides for educators and parents and activity books for children.
Rate your favorite New Products at www.districtadministration.com/products New Products Editor Ken Royal (kroyal@edmediagroup.com) Carol Patton is a contributing editor.
