Anseo.net takes a look back on some of the products we reviewed and awarded with a “Top of the Class” award. Over the last number of years, Anseo.net has reviewed dozens of products for several companies. One thing we pride ourselves on is in our honesty. Try reading a bad review for a book in certain teacher magazines! Although we don’t like to give bad reviews, we feel it is only fair to give our honest opinion on products and I think people respect it more. So, when we give a product a “Top of the Class” Award, it means we really love it! In 2010 only 4 products were given the accolade.
I met a couple of people at the IPPN conference in late January and saw that they had developed a student management system that was specifically aimed at the Irish primary school market. This was the beginning of a beautiful relationship! Without any exaggeration, I would say that Aladdin is the single most important communication tool I have running in my school. Aladdin allows the teacher to manage every aspect of administration in the school – from attendance to testing to reporting on behaviour to storing documents and policies and so much more. It has to be seen to be believed. Since the review, Aladdin is gaining a great reputation around Irish primary schools and I believe they will be expanding into second level soon.
It wasn’t until September that we awarded our next “Top of the Class” accolade to this series of handwriting books. Rozz admitted she wasn’t optimistic when she heard she would reviewing a product like this but her mind was changed when it was clear that this book had been written with all the correct pedagogical theory in place and that it was designed specifically for the Irish market; AND it was done very well indeed!
Signposts (Anita Dermody, Fionnuala Ward and Elisha Kelly)
Signposts is a teacher resource book designed for teaching the Learn Together curriculum in Educate Together schools. While there are a number of teacher resource books out there that aim to help the teacher teach lesson, they tend to fall a little bit short on how realistic they are or they fail to be foolproof. Signposts is brilliantly laid out and is designed in such a way that all one has to do is open the book and your whole lesson scheme is there.
Finally Prim-Ed got a second award for their Early Years Themes series, which were easily on par with Signposts (see above) for being foolproof for the infant teacher. It’s great to be able to pick up a teacher resource book and not have to worry about doing a lot of extra research.
We hope that 2011 will be another year of excellent products and look forward to slapping on our “star” of approval!
Last Update: August 22, 2017