CD-Rom of video-based curriculum activities

Price: pound;49 (single user)

pound;10 for each additional machine

pound;250 (network licence)

2Simple Educational Software

3-4 Sentinel Square

Brent Street

Hendon

London NW4 2EL

Tel: 020 8203 1781

Fax: 020 8202 6370

info@2simplesoftware.com

www.2simplesoftware.com

Fitness for purpose *****

Ease of use *****

Features *****

Design ****

Value for money *****

To say Infant Video Toolkit has been a success is an understatement. It has been extremely well received everywhere.

2Simple Software has now built on this foundation with a key stage 2 version entitled: Junior Video Toolkit. Comprising four programs (2Paint+, 2Graph+, 2Question+ and 2Investigate), this suite builds on the same principles that have made the Infant Video Toolkit a winner in the classroom and, like its predecessor, has loads of “video-ideas”. These not only explain how to use the software, but suggest good activities that take place in context within different subject areas across the curriculum.

2Question+ is a branching database that retains the logical and simple structure of 2Question but offers the facility to work flexibly with larger amounts of information and has more sophisticated clip art and picture-editing tools - again it’s very simple to use and understand. Children can create branching databases with up to 63 nodes including drag-and-drop to swap nodes or grab images straight from the web.

2Graph+ is a feature-rich, yet simple-to-use program, which enables children to quickly make bar charts, line graphs, 3D bar charts, pictograms and pie charts. It allows pupils to copy and paste data, graphs, work with multiple sets of data and use their own images in pictograms. It can work with multiple sets of data and children can choose images and define what each image represents.

2Paint+ is a painting and photo-editing program for KS2 pupils. Forget the simple-to-use painting facilities, this one is worth buying for the photo-editing tools alone! All the basics are there and there’s even a simple tool to allow images to be placed on top of each other with adjustable levels of transparency.

Saving the best for last, 2Investigate represents a new concept in educational, database-management software in that it has two unique features. First, it enables multiple users to enter data at the same time to the same database on a network and, second, it shows visually in real time what happens when a database sorts data, moving data around on the screen to form a bar chart, Venn diagram or show the results of a search. Available as a separate application, 2Investigate allows a database to be interrogated in a number of ways. Pupils can understand what is happening during these processes as they can see what the computer is doing!

These four excellent, suitably integrated applications have one more bonus:

“intelligent intervention”. If a child is trying to use certain features, but is making mistakes, the software will detect this and offer a short video teaching the pupil how to use it.

Junior Video Toolkit in one word? Knockout.

Chris Drage