One of the main advantages of this tool is derived from the possibilities of including media in different ways. For example, you can easily insert any resource available from the developer’s extensive media bank. Besides, you can attach sound to given objects, even by recording your voice on a microphone. Similarly, videos and snapshots can be captured using a camera. It is also great that you are allowed to record whatever is happening on your screen for future playback. Unfortunately, it seems that recording just a section of your screen is not possible.
To increase motivation and get more attention from the viewers, you can add special effects to the desired objects. Luckily, there are many to choose from, including swirl, mosaic, blur and old movie. I was particularly impressed with X-ray Vision, an interesting effect that allows moving a spyglass around to discover whatever is hidden beneath the top layers.
Easiteach NextGeneration helps you create language and numeracy activities. In this respect, it can generate cloze quizzes, punctuation activities, number lines, number grids and equation builder. The tool also has some pattern recognition features that include recognizing handwritten words and shapes. Likewise, it supports converting text to speech. These basic features are expanded with widgets such as Unit Converter, Graphing Calculator and Sharkbait.
All in all, Easiteach NextGeneration definitely helps you get the most from interactive whiteboards. The program uses its own format to store documents, but it supports importing PowerPoint presentations as well. It is paid software; yet, there is an edition called Easiteach Lite, which is a free player allowing annotations and word wallet. Fortunately, this solves the problem of distributing documents and sharing tasks with students inexpensively.
