Kidspiration Version 3
© 2008 Inspiration Software, Inc.
This all-purpose presentation package just keeps getting better and better, with a clean classroom friendly design, and narrated menus that a preschooler can use. It is an ideal teaching tool for a preschool or elementary teacher, to visually enhance a lesson with a Venn diagram, outline or graph. The program starts with a clean menu offering a new project or ideas for math, science or reading. Choosing the picture view option opens a blank screen, surrounded by menus for clip art, importing pictures, and so on. Like its big brother program, Inspiration, making an idea map is as easy as dragging and dropping shapes onto the screen. Lines that symbolize the relationship between the bubbles stretch automatically like rubber bands. The clip art library can be searched by key word, and there's a nice collection of math, reading and science images. For example, the math palette includes a set of base 10 blocks, plus a collection of geometric shapes. Other features to note include the ability to lock pages, to make a worksheet, record sounds, group objects together into one "super group" that can be resized together. Work can be synched to Palm handhelds, and we were able to easily import a standard JPG image. Drawbacks include a rather high price for parents ($69), an installation that requires typing in a cryptic code, and clip art images that get pixelated when enlarged. Hardware details to note: We tested Version 3 with Windows Vista with no problems, and the Macintosh version is now "native" -- meaning it is designed to work with Intel processor versions of OSX. You'll need 250 MB of hard disk space for a full install and full sound support, plus a Microphone if your computer doesn't have one built in. A printer is nice, and the program is great with an interactive electronic whiteboard. If you teach, you need Kidspiration.
$69, Windows, Mac OSX
Teaches: creativity, writing, planning, math, cognition, evaluation
CTR Rating: 94%