Produced by DISCIS for National Geographic. An exploration of space, with color photographs, texts, and narration in a "book" format. Pre-K through second grade. $34.99 Windows and Mac.
The CD is organized into 4 books, rather like "living books". The four titles under Exploring the Solar System and Beyond are:
* Let's Explore Space
* The Moon
* The Sun, and
* The Solar System.
There are numerous options when the students are reading a book on
the CD. The teacher can customize the book for the individual
student by selecting various options in the Customize menu. For
example, if the student double clicks on an item in the picture,
they will hear the Spanish version of the word. Or, if the student
clicks once on the item, they will see a label of what that item is
and hear its pronunciation.
Options include: pronunciation, sound effects, syllables, explanation, part of speech, Spanish, forma grammatical, pause. The customizer can set these options to pictures, words in text, sentence speakers (that appear before the words - usually used to have the sentence read aloud), and page corners.
This CD can be used for many things beyond teaching about the solar
system. It would be excellent for teaching children how to read,
learning Spanish, learning English, etc. The applications are
nearly limitless. [Top of Page]
The Instruction Booklet
Included with the CD are four books with the same titles, an
instruction booklet and a poster. The instruction booklet is very
valuable. It provides installation procedures for both Mac and PC
computers. It gives an overview of the entire kit and
troubleshooting for possible problems.
The best part is that the booklet gives you shortcuts and outlines
all possible options available on the CD-ROM. This is the booklet
teachers and librarians will want to look over carefully.
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Installation Details
Requirements for PC: MPC Level I System, 4 MB RAM,
hard disk with 2 MB for installation, Windows 3.1 or later, video
card that supports 256 colors, monitor with minimum resolution of
640 pixels X 480 pixels. CD-ROM drive with MSCDEX 2.2 driver,
386SX or compatible processor, 8 bit sound output device with
11.025 KHZ sample rate mandatory, 101-key keyboard.
For Macintosh: at least 2 MB of RAM, System version 6.0.8, 7.0 or higher, a monitor that can display at least 256 colors, CD-ROM drive.
Installation: follow the booklet instructions. It's a little more involved than most CDs, but very easy to do.
A Warning...: the CD ran very slowly on a 486 PC. In fact, I got frustrated at one point and had to quit the program because the reaction time was running up to one minute (sometimes over that). This could have been because the PC had too much in memory. I would try this program out first before buying it. Otherwise, I wholly recommend it for children in the primary grades.