Microsoft Student with Encarta Premium 2007
© 2006 Microsoft Corporation
Designed for students in the homework years (upper elementary to college) this is a collection of homework and research tools that can be a useful crutch for outlining a report or finding out how to subtract denominators, or learning how to pronounce a phrase in Spanish. This is the second edition of this program--the first was released last year. There is plenty of content to search. Consider that the heart of the program is Microsoft's Encarta (now called MSN Encarta), which is clearly the strength of this bundle. The other useful tool is the math graphing calculator that makes it possible to visualize trigonometry or calculus equations. There are thousands of historical documents, quotations, music samples and so on; all nicely indexed and searchable. Other hidden goodies include Encarta Kids, a 2003 release with a simplified picture menu featuring topics kids like to search on: animals, science, games, everyday life and so on. Encarta Kids also provides links to the main encyclopedia's content. The main menu has three categories: Homework (math tools, foreign languages and searching); Projects (papers & reports, presentations and charts & graphs); and Discover & Learn (explore Encarta, college and games). You can also choose to install a feature called Web Companion, a toolbar for Internet Explorer for searching Encarta content. Yet, there are several problems with Microsoft Student. Most problematic is a lack of distinction between commercial and informational content. When following a link for College Prep Online, most of the content is provided by either Princeton Review or Kaplan and these business relationships are not fully disclosed. Why are there no links to The College Board? Also, links to articles in MSN Encarta online contain advertising. Also problematic is the obvious leveraging of this product with other Microsoft products. For example, you need to have an existing copy of Microsoft Office installed on your computer in order to use the homework templates, which come as PowerPoint, Word or Excel files. When we installed the program on a computer without office, an error message was generated. If your computer is not online, the program is much less effective because of the dependence on links and content partnerships. Finally, many of the tutorial sections are dry clusters of non-interactive text, which are not actually tutorials. Still, there's plenty of useful easy-to-use content, making Microsoft Student worth considering for most students. The program can be installed entirely on the hard drive (using 3.1 GB of space) or it can run from the DVD. When installing, the program automatically updates your .NET and DirectX versions without prompting, which takes a bit of time.
$70, Windows XP (Service Pack 2 is required, uses 3.1 GB of space.
Teaches: reference, mathematics (graphing, grids, algebra, equations), homework help, art, science, history, geography
CTR Rating: 82%