Evaluations

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As the students make and build their work within the Kidspiration environment, the material they produce will be as up-to-date to the lesson plan and the goals the teacher is trying to achieve. The teacher should ensure they have completed their assigned piece of work, i.e. a summary graph of a chapter they have read, before continuing with the next assigned piece of work. As long as the teacher plans ahead the work to be carried out on Kidspiration, then the content should be accurate and reliable with regards to what is trying to be taught.

It is up to the teacher to set the level of difficulty of the activity being performed within Kidspiration. Supervision and encouragement should be given by the teacher to ensure the students progress with their activity.

There are also ready-made activities. Kidspiration comes with 75 built-in activity templates to help build standards-based skills across the curriculum. These can be tailored to the level of the student. Using the Activity Wizard, teachers easily create or modify activities to match the learning needs of individual students.

There are a number of tools included with the software that help empower the students to express their thoughts simply and easily. These provide the resources to tap into a variety of learning modes, .i.e. visual, aural and linguistic.

The symbol maker drawing tool is a useful tool to help build emerging literacy skills. This tool has a simple interface and students express their creativity and individuality by drawing and painting their own symbols.
Students integrate their personalised symbols into graphic organisers, enhancing the ability to communicate visually. With one simple step, any symbol can become a shape that designates a group. For example, students might place items for "school" into a backpack, rather than a plain circle or box. In this way, the activity becomes more engaging and meaningful.

The software also features a Venn diagram Super Grouper shape. This visual format gives students a way to more precisely show similarities and differences.
In Writing View, pictures are now displayed next to corresponding words. This reinforces the relationship between known language and a meaningful image. As always, students can add speech support by choosing to use the Listen tool.

If the teacher has created or modified an activity template, they have options for controlling the rate of delivery and level of content difficulty. To keep students focused, teachers can freeze the position of specific items in Picture View or Writing View. This assures that students won't accidentally move or delete necessary symbols or Super Grouper shapes in a teacher-created activity. Teacher can keep students on task by using the Activity Wizard to designate specific symbol libraries available for a project.

The teacher can designate instructions for Picture View only. A menu command makes it simple to create instruction-based symbols that do not transfer to Writing View, therefore allowing the teacher to give the student help on what should be written in writing view for the task.

The software is culturally, gender and racially balanced and gives students the choice to represent themselves or other people with either male or female images from different racial backgrounds.