Home PublicationsL&LIssuesVolume 26 (1998-1999) February (No. 5)

	Student-Reviewed Software
	Helping Middle School Students Identify Their Own Needs
	By Rose Reissman

Critical-thinking skills can serve kids far longer than they’re in the classroom. Being an informed consumer, for instance, means being able to assess the value of a particular product and how it might enhance one’s life. In this article, Rose Reissman describes how she got her students to assess something sight unseen and how that helps them think critically.

Although technology as a classroom tool—particularly software designed for middle-school students—would seem inherently student-centered, many educators actually direct their students to use teacher-centered software. These programs certainly serve specific curricular objectives and promote student performance, but they don’t nurture students’ abilities or their creativity as independent, reflective software users.

I want to promote both reflective and active software use among my middle schoolers, so I collect reviews of newly published software from newspapers and online resources. I group them by age level, intended grade, and level of interest. To help foster students who are independent, informed, and proactively engaged in a technology-centered workplace, I ask that they read the reviews and descriptions of new software products (some are paid advertisements written by the companies themselves) and come up with as many uses and applications for each product as they can. The students do not actually need to sample the product; in many cases, in fact, these new products are neither readily accessible nor affordable within the constraints of our inner-city budget. Still, the assignment challenges each student to work on his or her own file of potential software uses.

In March 1997, for example, Microsoft Corporation introduced Plus! for KIDS—a Windows 95 companion collection of programs targeted to children from 3 to 12 years old. The program is less than $25, but before we were able to explore the product, I collected two reviews, one from the peripherals column by L. R. Shannon in The New York Times and one from the New York Post. I photocopied the reviews for all of the students in my sixth-grade language arts class. The students were challenged to read the reviews to develop their own ideas about whether they would pleasurably and practically use this companion collection of programs.

At first, the students were puzzled by the challenge. If we didn’t actually have the software, then why review it? We talked about software they had bought or had been given, and software they were expected to use for school projects but found wanting. What if they could examine these products before they bought or received them from others? Even without actually exploring a program, couldn’t they tell by reading its packaging or the accompanying press sheets whether it might be interesting? As we spoke, the students began to see how they might personally benefit by reviewing programs designed for them, even if it only helped them decide what should not be purchased or set aside for their recreational or educational use.

The students were invited to read the software reviews in teams or work individually on their own reviews. After initially hesitating, they were eager to react to the software reviews once they understood their role as reviewing a review. Because the initial Plus! for Kids package was broken into different applications, the students listed their responses application by application. As they worked independently or in teams in writing and keyboarding their reactions to the product, they closely read the reviewer texts and used them as outlines for their own remarks.

The students took approximately 20 minutes or so to go through the reviews and carefully list their comments program by program. After they had finished their individual or team reviews, they were invited to share their reactions with the class. Here are some of their observations.

Microsoft’s Plus! for Kids Talk It
(a text-to-speech application in Spanish or English)

This program is really neat, because hearing the words you write out spoken by different voices (one could be a Martian) makes writing and reading fun. Talk It means a story a little child writes can be read aloud to other children. It would also help children act out their story characters. I think that the fact that a child could talk in Spanish is a plus!!

For a child who needs more time for spelling to be able to hear a story he or she tells without worrying about the spelling of the words is terrific.

Microsoft’s Plus! for Kids Play It
(turns the computer keyboard into a musical keyboard with musical styles, bands, and sounds)

This lets kids add in their own voices, and sounds to their stories. They are now real media producers!

If a class or student is studying Native Americans, the sounds of buffalo and actual chants can be added into a report. That might even make the other students more interested in listening to the report.

Why not put Talk It and Play It together so if students wanted to record their own favorite books they could do it with their own sound effects and music?

Microsoft’s Plus! for Kids Paint It
(a painting and drawing program)

This application has standard tools like a color bucket, airbrush, eraser, and line. It also has a blender to change a drawing in unusual ways, a bomb to destroy the artwork violently, and an oops icon to cancel the last thing done by the user!

I really loved “bombing” the art and playing around with the blender! The kinds of drawings I could create to go with my stories or friends’ stories or reports would be really awesome! I also like the oops because lots of times you make a mistake or you get upset but you can’t go back and cancel it!

This application is similar to MECC’s Storyweaver and KIDS Works, which I have already tried out. But being able to do it in Spanish means I can really tell stories in my “best true words” without having to translate and “simple” them down to English.

You know, students could use the Paint It feature to create product and
campaigns. . . . This feature could really help us create, see, share, and fix up as campaigns that look like and sound like what we see on television. That’s really neat!!

One of my problems with art is I see a picture in my head, but when I try to draw it, I can’t. With Paint It, what comes up on screen is pretty close to what I see in my head. Wow!

Microsoft’s Plus! for Kids Picture Picker
(clip-art application and typefaces)

You know I would like to use the Ransom font to create a kidnap note like that used in the Mel Gibson movie—Ransom. Then other users could develop stories and scenes to go with it, and, of course, all the sounds and music that could go with a kidnap suspense story.

I have a collection of Japanese comic books. This Comic Sans form will let me create my own story in this style.

I think Ransom would help involve students in following kidnap cases in the news. We could use all the different Microsoft’s Plus! for Kids programs to create our own news magazine. Then we could show it to other classes.

We took a full period and a half—some 90 minutes—to share the student’s software reviews. I made no comments other than those to facilitate conversation about the product’s potential uses. Beyond the students’ response to the particulars of Plus! for Kids, I was pleased by the way they independently linked their reviews to projects we had already done in class—news stories, recordings and illustrations of favorite literary pieces, personal creative writing, and review writing.

Approximately 30% of my students are Spanish-speaking and have limited English proficiency, which is reflective of this inner-city Brooklyn school. For that reason alone, I was happy that my young software reviewers were so appreciative of the ways in which Talk It would allow them immediately to tap their native language and realize their writing talents. In reading their reviews aloud—they had been entered on the computer but not yet enhanced with Paint It, Play It, or Picture Picker—I found that the students were most taken with the Plus! program’s visual and oral language possibilities. This fact, of course, reinforced for me the need to use technology’s spatial and auditory capacities to engage students who were not naturally linguistic learners in literacy activities and collaborative learning.

Finally, the students also reacted rather surprisingly, from my perspective, to Protect It, the program’s control feature that allows parents to restrict access to programs, files, settings, and modems. Almost all of my sixth graders favored such parental or teacher supervision, perhaps because many had heard horror stories of children who had been stalked online and then physically attacked or molested by adults. Although few of the students had home access to software programs or the Internet, one who did told of being punished by her father after she ran up a huge telephone bill by using the modem. Another student who spent time in his aunt’s office after school told how he got in trouble after inadvertently changing the sound card when he was just nine years old. His aunt had not appreciated his efforts.

The students have overwhelmingly given their approval to our plan to purchase the Plus! for Kids collection. The student software review project, however, won’t be used in our classroom just to review specific programs that the school can actually purchase. It will become a regular authentic writing activity and turned into a Web site or bulletin board feature on which students exercise and hone their critical skills; we hope these will become lifelong technology consumer skills. Such skills can actively engage students at the upper-elementary and secondary levels in evaluating and developing the ways in which new technology products meet or fail to meet their interests and concerns. Such feedback can be sent directly to software publishers or published in technology magazines alongside teachers’ or educators’ reviews.

If technology is to be used as a classroom tool to integrate curricula and promote students’ lifelong learning, then teachers need to shift from using specific technology products to addressing students’ identified needs and potential. If we do that, then we will indeed see our students leading and learning with technology.

Rose Reissman (maskin@cnct.com) is currently president of the Association of Computer Educators, New York; R&D consultant for FutureKids Technology Literacy Training Center; and president of the NYCATE. She also teaches a graduate-level course at Manhattanville College. Contact her at 110 Seaman Ave., 5C, New York, NY 10034.

Note. Microsoft PLUS! for Kids is no longer available from Microsoft
(www.microsoft.com/).

Copyright © 1999, ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education). All rights reserved.