Steering a clear course to learning. (New products: tools for schools).Clear Course, www.clearcourse.net, Software, $249 Imagine a system that creates multimedia-rich courses and lessons that help students learn the way the mind is designed to learn. The ClearCourse Construction Kit for Educators is a set of course management software tools created to help schools reach that goal. The kit was designed to help teachers and students present, learn, recall and test better. Each user can view, compare and learn information in the most comfortable way for him or her. The product's philosophy is based on Massachusetts Institute of Technology Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at Cambridge; coeducational; chartered 1861, opened 1865 in Boston, moved 1916. It has long been recognized as an outstanding technological institute and its Sloan School of Management has notable programs in business, professor Noam Chomsky's "deep structures of the human mind." The human mind organizes knowledge with several simultaneous methods--for example, wholes and parts, problems and solutions or things and attributes. Based on the situation, the mind selects one method to access only the relevant memories. Each course, built using the software's structure, helps students access information as if it were already in their minds. Nascent nascent /nas·cent/ (nas´ent) (na´sent) 1. being born; just coming into existence. 2. just liberated from a chemical combination, and hence more reactive because uncombined. Index, one of four main parts to the kit, breaks down course content into general ideas (conceptual relations) and specific bits of information (conceptual nodes); the outline format allows users to quickly browse (1) To view the contents of a file or a group of files. Browser programs generally let you view data by scrolling through the documents or databases. In a database program, the browse mode often lets you edit the data. See Web browser. through vast amounts of information. Multimedia items can be attached to nodes for automatic display. For example, a geography course might have a main node named "United States United States, officially United States of America, republic (2005 est. pop. 295,734,000), 3,539,227 sq mi (9,166,598 sq km), North America. The United States is the world's third largest country in population and the fourth largest country in area. ," with 50 nodes, each a state, attached. The AutoTest feature is an assessment item generator that automatically generates 17 question formats, which teachers can modify to suit their needs. Depending on the computer's processing speed See MHz. , five to nine questions are typically generated per second. Each question relates directly to the lesson content. Using the Score page, students get immediate feedback on incorrect answers and compare the content to determine what was misunderstood mis·un·der·stood v. Past tense and past participle of misunderstand. adj. 1. Incorrectly understood or interpreted. 2. . Also included in the kit is the ClearCourse Tutor TUTOR - A Scripting language on PLATO systems from CDC. ["The TUTOR Language", Bruce Sherwood, Control Data, 1977]. , a utility that allows users to view a read-only version of a project for practice. The fourth component of the kit, the ClearCourse Builder, allows educators to link projects to create a full course with templates from this multimedia authoring tool. The kit is available for single users as a download. Licensing for classroom use is also offered. CIRCLE #520 FOR MORE INFORMATION [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] |
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