Teach42

After a brief, but intense session of returning emails and blogging, I’m ready for the next session.

Whoa. Hold the presses. This is absolutely astonishing. I’m in room 204B, one of the general workshop rooms, and I actually have <>gasp<> working wifi! Something must have gone terribly wrong, because I know I’m not supposed to be able to do this, but I’m not complaining to anyone! So if there happens to be anything to link to, I can actually do so now.

The presenter is John Crick, he’s the founder of Crick software. They make a piece of software called Clicker that we sort of used at my old school. I really like the idea of it and think it could be a very effective instructional program, but we had all sorts of network issues with it that got in the way of us using it on a larger scale.

There’s a new version of it that just came out a few days ago, version 5.

Bah, I was so excited about the wifi thing that I actually forgot to start the iPod recording! So I didn’t get some of the introduction recorded. C’est la vie.

Clicker is sort of a word processor for elementary students but so much more. You can have it speak what they’ve written, and when it speaks the words, it highlights each word or every letter as it’s saying it. You can always click on any word and hear the individual word spoken aloud. The speech engine sounds pretty good too.

The bottom half of the screen is called Clicker grid. It has large bubbles with words in them that can be used to construct sentances. When you add the final piece of punctuation, it reads the sentance back to you. When you click on one of the words, you can also preview what it is by having it spoken aloud. You can use pictures as well as words. If you click on a picture, it inserts the picture, the word or both in the sentance.

By clicking on the arrows on either side of the grid screen, you can navigate to new grids with different sets of words and pictures. It’s immediatley clear just how valuable this would be to struggling students. They can write, truly write, even if they have problems constructing sentances. They can keep checking to make sure things make sense by having their work read back to them as they create it.

Teachers can quickly and easily change the bubbles in the grid (if a child wants to go off the grid) but shift-clicking on a bubble and editing one of the existing words. The rapidity and ease of this process is invaluable to teachers.

It’s just as easy to create your own custom grids. File -> New grid, choose your template, type in the words. Piece of cake, upside down. He just brought up a great idea, brainstorm words with the students and then create a grid from those words that the students can use immediately for their assignment. As he is filling in a custom grid based on suggestions from the audience, the words are being checked against a database of images that they have and are dynamically being assigned images. So when he typed in the word milk and hit enter, it added a picture of a carton of milk to the button. Very nicely done. Couldn’t possibly be easier.

You can also browse through the picture library to grab images for your grid. By default, it adds the words along with the picture, but you can always customize it. Of course, you can always use your own images from your hard drive if you want.

Wow, he’s demonstrating how easy it is to download new grid sets from their web site and use them within Clicker. Incredibly easy. I wonder if they have a way for people to submit grids that they have created. That would be useful for collaboration.

Side note: One more reason why we need Wifi available everywhere. Right now in iChat, Tom Hoffman, Tim Lauer and David Warlick are all online at the same time and available via IM. Anybody who has Bonjour turned on would see them locally. Too cool for words.

Back to Clicker. You can have a pop up sentance that the students either need to copy or respond to. Of course it can be read aloud, but it does have to be closed before they respond. So you can’t just copy it, you need to remember it and create it yourself.

You can also put in animated .gif’s, videos and just about anything you might want. When you put an animation in a bubble and click on it, it runs it. When you add it to a sentance, you also see the animation. Nice, simple, elegant.

You want to talk about forethought? The pages you save in Clicker are HTML based. That means that they are essentially web pages. You can save them, upload them to a web server and have them be available online! That’s the default. Wow. Brilliant idea and definitely forward thinking.

There’s also a way to force students to use different parts of a sentance. Hard to describe, but I”ll try. Imagine three columns. The first column has phrases like “The boy”, “The girl” and “The child”. The second column has verbs like “builds”, “paints” and “makes”. The third column has phrases like, “a sandcastle”, “a picture” and “a model”. The student clicks on a bubble from the first column. When they do, it adds the word to Clicker writer (the word processor) and then locks out that column and the third column. Essentially, it forces the child to choose from the middle column, and then to choose from the third column. So they have to write from left to right. Every sentance is a winner, it’s impossible to not make a grammatically correct sentance. Very cool.

Someone is asking about using Clicker in a foreign language. It really would be perfect for second language instruction.

The Mac version hasn’t been completed just yet, should be available in September. The files are all cross platform.

Next up is making ‘Talking books’ with Clicker (side note: I keep trying to write it as “Clickr”. Flickr has invaded my writing and is causing me to want to drop those e’s!). File -> new Talking Book, choose your template and get started. Very easy to add a title, a picture, even record your own voice to annotate the page.

This really is a great piece of software. It’s not a replacement for Micrsoft Word, it’s what elementary teachers should ahve been using as a word processor all along. Although calling it a word processor is really doing it a disservice.

One last thing, you can also create hotspots that link to other grids. I would assume that you can create hyperlinks to internet sites as well. I don’t know for sure, but if I were a betting man (and I am), I’d put money down that you could. Hot spots can also play audio, so you could have a map of the school, click on classrooms to see photos of the room and then click on students in the picture to hear those students saying something about their class. Neat, eh?

Wrapping up now. I normally dislike exhibitor sponsored sessions, but this was worth it. Great piece of software. I’ll link to audio from the session once I get it uploaded and edited.

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