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.
v1.3 [Oct 18, 2011]
The software has a new and improved design, providing intuitive navigation and bringing the tools you love most to the forefront of the application. A range of new features including built-in widgets and multimedia assets in a range of topic areas will help to fuel your ideas and bring lessons to life.
Previous versions of RM Easiteach provided modular toolsets, giving subject specific tools as optional extras, but now all of the key tools and widgets are available with a single licence. For example you are now free to use the cloze tool to create engaging lesson content in any subject, not just English.
RM Easiteach Next Generaton can now export to the whiteboard common file format, so activities can be shared among many different applications - in different establishments or even countries. We've launched a content portal too, so you can easily share what you create with others - or use their ideas as inspiration.
