Blue Ribbon Reviews May 2006
By Linda Lindroth

These two products will truly integrate technology into your reading and math programs.

K to the 8th Power
Your students will love learning technology literacy with comprehensive online curriculum from K to the 8th Power, Inc. This web-based courseware includes over 500 interactive, self-paced lessons that integrate technology skills with Language Arts and Math lessons – and each lesson is correlated to specific state standards.

In Teacher mode, it's possible to set up classes, add assignments and search the lesson database for Beginner and Advanced lessons for grades K-8 that match your state standards. This mode also shows all the resources and technology applications supported by each lesson with complete, printable lesson plans. There is even a lesson rubric and an activity sample to show what the finished product should look like. There's also a Gradebook for tracking progress.

A self-paced lesson on the topic of presentations is shown here.

In Student mode, students choose an assignment and work through the lesson with lots of audio support. There is an advanced and beginner language version and it can be differentiated for ELL/ESL (Sheltered English, not Spanish). The table of contents lets students go back to review a skill. Every lesson ends with an automated quiz and the interface changes to match the grade level.

The Buzz. Click the Resources button to go to "The Buzz," the student activity zone. Here kids can select Simulations to learn different technology functions, play Games that support all the content skills and search an extensive Photo database.

To find out more, visit www.kto8.com for sample lessons. $6-$10/per student based on school size.

LeapTrack® 4.0
LeapFrog® SchoolHouse has another winner on the market! This one is a student assessment product, LeapTrack® Assessment & Instruction System for grades K-5. Version 4.0 has both assessment and instructional content aligned to the content standards for every state in reading, math and language arts.

The system consists of Management Software (Win/Mac), formative assessment books, hundreds of skill cards in reading, math and language arts, Student Memory cartridges and a LeapPort™ Cartridge Station for collecting test results and assigning student lesson paths. There are interactive, decodable books for grades K-2.

The system uses LeapPad® (K-2) or Quantum Pad® Personal Learning Tools (3-5) for formative testing and motivating differentiated instruction. The three-step process – assess, report, prescribe – makes it easy for the teacher to use the Management Software to track student progress based on key state standards.

Using the Management Software, there are 17 different reports for the classroom or school and six more for the district level. A Parent report in Spanish makes it easy to address the needs of ELL/ESL learners. Teachers can print, e-mail or save reports as PDF files.

The LeapPort™ Cartridge Station transfers data from the computer to the student cartridges. The Student Memory Cartridges store and deliver the prescribed learning path and instructional content with audio instructions for the student and uploads lesson results to the computer.

For more information, or to see a product demo, visit www.leapfrogschoolhouse.com or call 800-883-7430. Systems start at $3,695 per grade level.

Linda K. Lindroth is Technology Editor and Web Coordinator for Teaching Pre K-8. She is also a Technology Resource Teacher in a K-5 computer lab in Lexington, KY.