November 2005 — Product Focus

Print this article | Email this article

Click here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal

Product::FOCUS

THE NEWEST RELEASE of Kurzweil 1000 from Kurzweil Educational Systems offers blind and visually impaired readers a broader choice of reading materials by giving them the ability to create audio files of documents that can be accessed in portable DAISY (http://www.daisy.org) players or from a computer with DAISY software. Version 10 has also incorporated ScanSoft OCR 12.6 to improve its scanning and recognition capabilities, making it easier for users to create and modify tables using simple editing operations that include the ability to convert tables to text, and vice versa. In addition, the program has added a new noise-filtering option that eliminates confusion for the reader at the end of a page, expanded its online and retrieval capabilities, and updated its version of the NeoSpeech text-to-speech program. Price: a single license is $995. http://www.kurzweiledu.com.

AUTOSKILL INTERNATIONAL’S Literacy Intervention Suite offers K-12 students a consistent, personalized approach to building foundational reading and math literacy skills by combining the latest versions of Academy of Reading and Academy of Math educational software solutions into a single package. Both research-based programs provide students with the skills needed to realize their full potential through individualized training that gradually builds fundamentals and complements other intervention approaches, such as tutors or teacher-led instruction. The Literacy Intervention Suite can also easily be managed and scaled across an entire district while working within existing network environments, which gives teachers and administrators access to all management tools from any workstation on the network. Pricing varies. http://www.autoskill.com.

SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGY INC. (STI) has released InformationNOW, a personalized, browser-based platform that can search data sets from any of STI’s suites of data management solutions, and transform the information into easy-to-understand reports that are available to authorized personnel directly from their home pages. Users can also take advantage of InformationNOW’s query tools to create customized reports from other school programs to track trends and become more efficient in their decision-making process. In addition, users can set parameters around a possible event, such as low attendance or poor test scores, and receive e-mail alerts when those parameters have been reached. Pricing varies. http://www.sti-k12.com.