Alan Stewart’s Blog

I’ve just spent the last two days at the Drumossie Hotel, Inverness where I had the pleasure of talking with a considerable number of Gaelic teachers from around Scotland. There were delegates from Highland, Western Isles, Argyll & Bute, Glasgow, and East Dumbarton………..and probably some more.

I’ve been involved with various Gaelic teachers and advisors over the past few years due to the usefullness, in languages, of much of the software that we use in additional support needs. i.e. good multi-sensory, multimedia packages such as Textease and Clicker 5 which lend themselves to bookmaking, sentence construction, annotation, etc – and in any language you want. It’s so easy to record your own voice messages to these applications and teachers can use existing resources and make their own tailored to their own pupils.

I delivered 5 sessions on Textease – its use as a great interactive ‘blackboard’, how it can be used as the foundation and repository for ‘virtual topic boxes’ and its ease of use as a desktop publisher and presentation tool. Most teachers tell me that they had no idea the software could do all these things. A reflection of the prevelent notion that I often hear – that it’s a wee word processor for the infants!!!!!

My recommendation is that you take another look at this especially if you now have a digital projector in your classroom – you’ll not find a more flexible and easy-to-use package to prepare and deliver punchy teaching presentations.

The ’stuff’ I mentioned during the presentations can be found here.