Intellitools Classroom Suite - CTG 2003
When I went to the 2003 Closing the Gap Conference I received an introduction to Intellitools. Here is when I wrote:
Intellitools (www.intellitools.com) has made a suite that includes Intellipics, Intellitalk, and Intellimathics. The new suite is different from the old versions because of new authoring tools that make it very easy to create your own activities (either from scratch or from templates). The suite is still in beta testing but will be shipping soon. The part I thought was interesting is that the suite can be installed as a client/server model. The server allows students to authenticate and get their Intellitools activity assignments/quizzes and submit them for instant grading with reports sent to the teacher. The client/server model is supposed to work with Mac Manager (or a mac without Mac Manager) or on a Windows machine. I don't know how common this product is, and I hate to advocate for any one vendor, but this suite seems to have a lot of great features. Word prediction is built into their talking word processor. Symbols can be associated with words, activities can be created with images and toolbars from scratch or from a variety of templates that come with the software. The open-ended nature of this suite makes me think it would be a suite the School of Education could use to illustrate the types of features that make software accessible as well as for students to use to create their own activities and take to the schools during their student teaching.
In 2003 I thought the concept was very nice. I spent a little time here "lobbying" about the way that the components were great at facilitating learning for kids of varying abilities. I still think it was great, but we never did end up getting a copy of it for our "loaner laptop" fleet. Our teacher prep students have the opportunity to borrow a laptop and take it out into their placements. These laptops have a variety of assistive technology software titles on them, and I still think that Intellitools would make a nice addition. As an aside, it looks like that company has been acquired by Cambium Learning.