Interactive Literacy

Interactive Literacy 3rd Class
This is CD-ROM and Teachers’ Handbook series from Prim-ED, it is available for 1st- 6th Class. It is based, I am presuming on the English Curriculum as it uses the word “Literacy” and also uses the terms ” Speaking and Listening”, ” Text work”, “Sentence work” and many other terms that I would associate with the English Curriculum. It aims to cover Oral, reading and writing.
The CD works on your individual PC for your own lesson planning and worksheets and on your Interactive Whiteboard for whole class.
The layout of the CD will be very familiar to Interactive Whiteboard users, it uses a “Text Screen Toolkit”, which allows the user to highlight, delete or draw on the text or illustrations. Within the CD, every element of the worksheets, stories, dramas, poems etc are printable and editable. I was able to edit the text given for a play for the children and leave blanks within the text before I printed it.
The Teacher’s Handbook is broken up into 3 terms, with 3 units of work being available within each term. The Unit of Work I have focused on for review was the “Plays” unit. This Teacher’s Handbook unit covers a various activities with creative ideas to extend outside of the English lesson.
Relevance to curriculum aims: This product is not totally based on the English Curriculum here in Ireland but because it is a literacy product, it would fit extremely well into any English lesson you may want to teach!
I would have liked to see some work done in the area of differentiation and assessment within the teachers’ handbook. Particularly as the CD is crying out for individual pupil assessment. The CD does deal with differentiation well as the activities and worksheets are all editable by the teacher-3/5
Teacher usability:
I do not have the luxury of an Interactive Whiteboard so I feel I could not get full use out of the Interactive Literacy product. I used the product to print and edit activities. The Teacher’s handbook was great for ideas and for extending work for the children but i felt it was slightly disorganised and would it would have benefited from a more structured lesson plan format. In this way, I did have to look over the “Activities” section before hand so I would know what I had to print, edit and prepare.
The children really enjoyed the lessons. The first lesson I printed out the full drama and we used it together for a “readers’ theatre” session. We then worked on some oral comprehension. I edited one scene of the drama and deleted the verbs, the children then had to work on the deleted words and add their own verbs to make a brand new drama. They were totally engrossed from start to finish with this lesson. Other lessons developed their writing skills using worksheets and other lessons used real video clips for speaking and listening. The video was harder for the children to all see properly as i only had a small PC screen but they got the idea!4/5
Value for money: This lasts for one full year for English though I actually got through the activities much more quickly than normal. It costs €220 for single use licence and this to me is quite expensive. I think you would more use and value for money if you used this on an interactive whiteboard or even with a simple projector. For me, I would need a lot more to go with this for the money as I had to print out all my own worksheets and put some extra time into preparation. However it is also content free, in other words you as the teacher can mess about with the text, pictures and customise your own worksheets or activities.
The Interactive Handbook needs further development with additional materials for the product to be worth €220. The CD, however is an excellent product as it creatively teaches literacy to the children with the added bonus of the teacher having the power to edit, customise and individualise his/her own classes work.4/5
Extras: There are no extras on this product. However, if you don’t want to take my word on it, then contact Prim-Ed as they will be able to send you a classroom demo free of charge! 1/5
Final Result: 12/20