Dr. T's Sing-A-Long Around the World

$19.95, Windows CD-ROM, Mac CD-ROM

Teaches: music from around the world, music appreciation

CTR Review

This sequel to "Dr. T's Sing-A-Long Classics" contains 21 unique children's songs from countries like Ghana, Russia, Venezuela, USA and Japan. With the world map as a menu, children click on a country to hear its national anthem. (Some testers found this to be confusing, as the national anthem is not related to the title of the song from the country). This leads to the "Sing-A-Long" activity, where the song is played and illustrated in slideshow fashion. Children can control the songs by using keys similar to a tape player. As the music plays, they can see the stream of words, notes and rests move along the bottom of the screen. By using pulldown menus (a "little kids mode" limits access to menus), they can switch languages to hear the song sung in it's native language or in English. They can also switch the notation to include guitar chords, change the speed of the song, or turn off the lyrics to use the music as an accompaniment while they sing along (although special setup is required to record their voice). Testers, including a music teacher, reported the music to be appealing, nicely arranged, and with authentic sounding vocals in the native versions. However, they reported that what a child could actually do with this program seemed minimal when compared with other children's software, except that children could see and print notation and could easily access their choice of high quality music (and switch musical selections).