Classroom Suite

Just finished exploring Classroom Suite...seems like a great program. It easily meets one of the primary goals of computer use in the classroom which is to provide students with an alternative means of completing schoolwork, participating in classroom activities, or demonstrating knowledge. For students who do not respond well to traditional teaching methods and/or classroom materials such as completing pencil and paper worksheets, Classroom Suite offers an alternative way of presenting information and of allowing students to interact with the material and express themselves through multiple pathways. Classroom Suite can be used to teach basic concepts and academic skills, to allow students to practice these skills, and to assess students for mastery of a skill or concept using a three-step process: 1) Show Me, 2) Practice, and 3) Challenge. In the Show Me stage for example, teachers can create video sequences of themselves modeling the activity or skill which students can watch as many times as necessary. In the Practice stage, teachers can use a tool called Unit Builder to create a sequence of activities for students to complete in working their way toward mastery. In the Challenge stage, teachers can lock certain features in order to assess the students’ performance on certain activities and determine mastery of the skill or concept. The program can also be used to track individual students’ progress.
Classroom Suite can be used to support students in almost every curriculum area including reading, writing, and math. In each area, Classroom Suite offers ready-made templates that can be used as they are or modified to meet the needs of individual students using the program’s three main components: IntelliTalk, IntelliMathics, and IntelliPics. In addition to making every lesson customizable, Classroom Suite offers a variety of tools to provide access to individuals with a wide range of abilities. For example, students who have difficulty using a keyboard or mouse can use scanning features to navigate the program using a switch interface. For students with visual impairment, emergent readers, or for students who have difficulty reading, Classroom Suite offers features that can provide students with audio feedback using various speech, talking, and read aloud options. Other features such as visual displays, sounds and music, level of difficulty, and content are all customizable and modifiable. We were able to see many of Classroom Suite’s accessibility features being put to good use by the team who worked with Sapphire. For students whose needs still are not able to be met using the program’s built-in features, there is an Additional Access Kit that can be purchased as a supplement to the regular program to provide even more options for access.
In addition to being easy to use and extremely adaptable, Classroom Suite makes it easy for teachers to share the materials they create using the program. Teachers can visit the IntelliTools’s Classroom Activity Exchange (http://www.intellitools.com/) to view activities that other teachers have created. Teachers can then modify these activities to suit the needs of the students their own classrooms.