November 2010 What’s New

November 2010 What’s New

Online & Software

Acuity Enhancements
(www.acuityforschool.com)

The new enhancements for the Acuity InFormative Assessment solution include a feature that automatically assigns instructional resources to students based on their Acuity assessment results. Available with Acuity’s Predictive, Diagnostic, and Custom Assessments in Math and English Language Arts, this feature personalizes the content delivered to each student. The assigned resources each include three parts: personalized instruction, guided practice items, and a final evaluation assessment.

Price: Contact company for pricing.
Category: assessment

A.D.A.M. Inside Out Health and Wellness
(

www.AdamEducation.com)

This is an addition to the A.D.A.M. Education suite of products, which are designed to assist educators in teaching nutrition, the significance of healthy eating, and the importance of incorporating 60 minutes of physical activity into a person’s daily routine. All lessons provide students with a path to self-directed learning that includes animations and interactive resources.

Price: Contact company for pricing.
Category: health

Adobe Acrobat X Pro
(www.adobe.com/education/products/acrobatpro)

With the new version of Adobe Acrobat X, faculty, administration, and students across districts can collaborate, increase productivity, and share their work. The new Portfolio Wizard allows educators to combine a wide range of content--including video and interactive media--in a single customizable ePortfolio, ideal for distributing course material and assessing student growth. Faculty and staff can save time and standardize processes by automating routine, multistep tasks with new guided actions. Acrobat X Pro and Reader X are scheduled to ship within 30 days, with availability through Adobe Authorized Education Resellers, the Adobe Education Store, and Adobe Direct Sales.

Price: Adobe Acrobat X Pro Student and Teacher Edition is $119; volume licensing for Acrobat X Pro starts at $159.
Category: Productivity

CAMS & STAMS
(www.curriculumassociates.com)

The CAMS (Comprehensive Assessment for Mathematics Strategies) & STAMS (Strategies to Achieve Mathematics Success) series provides a powerful integrated assessment and instruction program which includes engaging interactive whiteboard activities for skills practice and to ensure student mastery of every concept. Designed for students in grades 3-8, CAMS is a research-based diagnostic tool, including pretests, benchmarks, and post-tests, that help identify students’ strengths and weaknesses, target instruction, and measure progress and mastery of the most important math skills at each grade level. STAMS consists of a series of highly-scaffolded lessons that allow for explicit instruction based on the results from the CAMS series of assessments.

Price: The CAMS series and STAMS series contains 25 Student Books and one Teacher Guide, for a total of 50 Student Books and two Teacher Guides for $359.00.Price: $359 for 50 student books and two teacher guides; $39.90 for a pack of 10 student books; $5.95 for each teacher guide.
Category: math

CCC! Internet-Only Version 9
(www.cccvod.com)

New Dimension Media has launched an Internet-only model for CCC !, so a school can adopt the system without installing a server or hardware. It offers all the educational programming of the server-based CCC ! at special Internet-only pricing.

Price: Contact company for pricing.
Category: video streaming

EdWeb 2.0
(www.edweb.us)

Now an open-source CMS for Education, EdWeb 2.0 is designed to complement a school district’s Web site rather than replace it, providing the district with a more comprehensive Web presence. Additional features include aggregated search, to find links to educational sites input by all teachers in the district; student log-ins, which permit nonanonymous comments by students on teachers’ blogs; a lesson-plan repository, and a share portal for sharing documents.

Price: Contact company for pricing.
Category: Website authoring

ePals and LearningSpace Collaboration
(www.learningspace.epals.com)

ePals, Inc. has announced an advanced caching solution that will provide real-time access to the company’s LearningSpace product, a Web-hosted virtual workspace for creating, sharing, managing, and collaborating on educational content from any location at any time. The solution helps teachers and students create and collaborate on high-bandwidth multimedia projects in a safe environment while it satisfies schools’ bandwidth needs by ensuring reliable access for greater learning experiences.

Price: Contact company for pricing.
Category: virtual workspace

ExOS 5.5
(www.exinda.com)

By ensuring the optimal use of available bandwidth and easy diagnosis and resolution of network problems, ExOS 5.5 enables educational institutions to maximize the traffic over their networks without incurring additional infrastructure costs. ExOS software running on the x60 family of WAN Optimization appliances provides the inspection, identification, and reporting functions essential to effective WAN optimization, intelligent acceleration, and traffic shaping.

Price: Contact company for pricing.
Category: networking

Explore The Blue Enhancements
(www.exploretheblue.com)

The Take Me Fishing campaign and Discovery Education have added even more educational tools to the recently updated Explore the Blue Website. The site offers new digital media on the importance of outdoor recreational activities, such as boating and fishing, and the value of clean and healthy natural resources. It also features custom lesson plans for K–5 students and standardsaligned educational videos for supplementing classroom learning. Educators, parents, and students can visit Explore the Blue to find more than 12,000 places to boat and fish, as well as local services, activities, and events, and much more.

Price: Contact company for pricing.
Category: video, social studies

Facebook for Students
(www.atomiclearning.com)

Facebook for Students highlights the basics of using the most popular social networking site; how to find the site’s educational and useful features—for example, the option of deleting comments or posts—and how and why one would create a group. The product also explains important safety features and provides tips on how to be safe online and how to protect your online persona. These tutorials provide a plethora of knowledge that can’t be gained simply by signing up for Facebook.

Price: Contact company for pricing.
Category: training, social networking

Faronics Anti-Virus
(www.faronics.com)

Faronics has announced the release of malware protection that combines anti-virus, antispyware, and anti-rootkit technology to provide a coordinated preemptive response to advanced malware. Faronics Anti-Virus integrates with the system-restore solution Faronics Deep Freeze to apply anti-virus updates while computers are protected in a frozen state.

Price: A trial version can be downloaded at the Web site.
Category: security

Fluency Tutor
(www.texthelp.com)

With this product, students can independently practice their reading, record themselves reading, answer questions about comprehension, submit assessments to their teachers, and view their progress over time. Teachers can assign individual students and groups passages appropriate to their level for practice and assessment. They can listen to and mark students’ recorded assessments at their convenience and get automatically generated WCPM and prosody scores. Using the data from Fluency Tutor’s reports, teachers can personalize instruction to meet individual students’ needs, and students can see where they have to focus to improve their oralreading skills. The newest version of Fluency Tutor, which includes passage illustrations, comprehension questions, expanded reporting, and more group options, further enhances both the teacher and student experience.

Price: Annual subscriptions start at $2,245.
Category: reading

MixedInk
(www.mixedink.com/educator)

MixedInk, an online collaborativewriting startup, has launched a suite of features designed for the classroom. With these tools, teachers can enable students to write together, evaluate their classmates’ writing, and learn from their peers. The MixedInk platform invites students to remix each other’s words and ideas while automatically tracking authorship through the collaborative process. By encouraging students to reuse their peers’ ideas, the tool offers an innovative model for classroom collaboration that pushes traditional boundaries. The educator package provides a number of teacher-friendly features including password protection, an interactive report showing each student’s independent contributions, and the ability to remove inappropriate content.

Price: Contact company for pricing.
Category: writing

NASA and CK-12 Partnership
(www.ck12.org)

NASA and the nonprofit CK-12 Foundation have announced a new chapter in CK-12’s 21st Century Physics FlexBook: A Compilation of Contemporary and Emerging Technologies. The FlexBook represents an important step in keeping science information pertinent and accurate through the emerging trend of online textbooks, or ebooks. The new chapter provides students and teachers with a look at a contemporary NASA space transportation project and explains how simulation-based engineering is used to develop new technology, in this case, the Launch Abort System (LAS ), which is managed at NASA Langley. The LAS is a state-of-the-art astronaut escape system created to significantly improve flight-crew safety.

Price: available free of charge, visit www.ck12.com to access the book for download.
Category: science

PDF To JPG Converter
(www.pdftojpgconverter.com)

This new freeware converter lets users convert Adobe PDF documents or several documents to image formats such as JPG, BM P, GIF , PNG, and TIFF . The utility also allows users to convert multi-page PDF s to several single-page JPG images and to select the output-image DPI. The new converter has an easy tabbed interface that enables converting PDF to image with a few simple clicks.

Price: free
Category: freeware

PLATO Learning Online Courses
(www.plato.com)

PLATO Learning has introduced new content for two of its existing high school science courses. The retooled online courses are designed to meet the needs of both creditrecovery and first-time students seeking semester-long credits in biology and chemistry. The courses benefit students by featuring the latest updates in science education, including inquiry science activities, labs, and online simulations. Further, they were created to support schools’ science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM ) initiatives. The interdisciplinary STEM approach incorporates these four subjects into one cohesive means of teaching and learning, helping students explore them in a more applicable manner.

Price: Contact company for pricing.
Category: Science

Questionmark Perception
(www.questionmark.com)

Questionmark has added French and Spanish browser-based interfaces to its Perception assessment-management system. The French and Spanish interfaces are part of Service Pack 1 for Questionmark Perception version 5.2, which has provided multilingual participant-facing interfaces in 20 languages and a Translation Management System that streamlines the authoring, management, and delivery of multilingual online quizzes, tests, surveys, and exams.

Price: Contact company for pricing.
Category: assessment

Schoolnet Respond RTI Software
(www.schoolnet.com)

Schoolnet introduces Respond, a comprehensive Response to Intervention (RTI ) software solution. By organizing student data in a central location, Respond automates student screening, streamlines the creating of intervention plans and progress monitoring, and provides detailed reports and dashboards that give instructional leaders the tools they need to implement successful RTI programs. With Respond, districts have an open platform for defining their intervention criteria.

Price: Contact company for pricing.
Category: assessment, RTI

Shmoop
(www.shmoop.com)

Shmoop has, launched its online SAT prep service, which uses beloved video games, like Oregon Trail, Tetris, and Mario Brothers, as metaphors for various challenges that students will face on the SAT . In fact, Shmoop SAT Prep is itself a bit of a game. Students earn Shmoints for correctly completing portions of the SAT prep course; top Shmoint scorers win Shmoop T-shirts. Shmoop’s SAT prep service contains more than 500 vocabulary words; 1,006 practice problems in SAT reading, writing, and math; and more.

Price: $23 a student; contact company for district pricing.
Category: SAT prep

StarrMatica and eInstruction Partnership
(www.starrmatica.com)

StarrMatica Learning Systems has partnered with eInstruction to provide free interactive content to classrooms nationwide. eInstruction customers will receive a six-month membership in StarrMatica’s online library of interactive content with all new purchases of mobile interactive whiteboards, interactive dual boards, and student response systems. StarrMatica’s online library includes more than 3,800 K–6 reading and math simulations, animations, activities, games and assessments, along with a search engine for finding content by grade, topic, and state-standard, national-core, and textbook curricula.

Price: Contact company for pricing.
Category: interactive-whiteboard content

Thinkspiration
(www.inspiration.com)

Inspiration Software’s new blog is a forum in which educators and educational experts of all levels of experience and areas of focus can exchange ideas, sharing research, news, trends, and lessons to help students achieve to their greatest potential. Thinkspiration also features the Inspired Calendar, which provides lesson plans and activities to use in employing Inspiration, Kidspiration, and InspireData with students to mark national and international holidays, celebrations, and events.

Price: free
Category: forum

Toon Boom 6
(www.toonboom.com)

Toon Boom Studio 6 expands its animation capabilities with its bonerigging features. It serves as the most complete launch pad for learning and creating animation, whether at home or in the classroom. As a bonus, Studio 6 comes with several bone-ready templates that users can incorporate into their own projects. This template pack speeds up the process of animating. In addition, it has a 62-minute how-to video that covers step-by-step instructions on creating bone animation.

Price: $149.99 (academic price)
Category: animation

WriteToLearn 6.0
(www.school.writetolearn.net)

The newest version of Pearson’s online tool for building writing skills and developing reading comprehension enables students to develop skills in essay writing and summarizing that are measured by Pearson’s state-of-the-art Knowledge Analysis Technologies (KAT ) engine. WriteToLearn 6.0 now features expanded text-to-speech capability. Using Texthelp Systems’ embedded reading-support technology, SpeechStream, students can have reading passages, feedback on essays, and their own writing read aloud to them. WriteToLearn’s grammar-checking capability has also been expanded to provide students with more feedback on errors.

Price: Contact company for pricing.
Category: writing

www.energybalance101.com

Powered by Discovery Education, this product promotes ways to help young people achieve a healthy weight through energy balance. The curriculum includes lesson plans, resources, and videos aligned to state standards for the K–2 and 3–5 grade ranges. The entire curriculum can be integrated into classroom instruction but is flexible enough that teachers can use the complete scope of resources or select the elements that fit their needs best. Each module includes background information and tips that help teachers, as well as dynamic activities and engaging Discovery Education digital media. Family and community extension resources are also included to facilitate learning beyond the classroom.

Price: free to educators
Category: health

Spelling Connections
(www.zaner-bloser.com/spellingconnections)

This program provides developmentally appropriate instruction using a five-day plan, an array of assessment options, and technology tools. The research-based word lists provide true differentiated instruction for students at all levels, including English Language Learners. A full complement of exciting interactive games, interactive-whiteboard-ready digital resources, and online practice activities engage today’s media-savvy students and reinforce instruction inside the classroom and at home.

Price: Contact company for pricing.
Category: reading, writing

Cool School Apps

Alphabet 1.5 App
(www.piikeastreet.com)

Alphabet 1.5 for iOS takes alphabet learning for babies, toddlers, and preschoolers to the next level by giving them plenty of opportunity to interact with the letters. The original artwork and characters draw them in, fun animation and sound effects pique their interest, and memorable, unique interactions keep them coming back for more. This new version of the app includes a slew of other often requested features, like lowercase letters and phonics sounds. The letters are pronounced softly, and the upbeat music and sound effects will have kids dancing, mimicking, and asking Mom and Dad if they can have their own iPads.

Price: $2.99
Category: English

Doodle Cam 1.0 App
(www.macphun.com)

Take real life in real time and transforms it into cartoon-style videos and photos that can be saved and shared instantly. Users have their choice of 11 effects and seven soundtracks, which can be changed while recording with just a tap of the screen. Whatever a user sees on the iPhone screen is what they get in their photo or video.

Price: $1.99
Category: visual effects

Geotimescale Enhanced/ Geotimescale Enhanced HD Apps
(www.tasagraphicarts.com)

These apps illustrate significant events and periods in Earth’s history. The Geologic Time Scale shows the names of the eons, eras, periods, epochs, and ages along with their corresponding dates. Both apps include illustrations and information about significant events. They provide a complete reference for students, educators, professional geologists, and anyone interested in geology. No Internet connection is required.

Price: $0.99
Category: science

GoodReader App
(www.goodreader.net)

This iPad and iPhone app has just added the feature that allows users to annotate any PDF with text, freehand drawings, and several other styles. The feature lets them mark up and share manuals, schematics, meeting notes, and other materials. Another new feature is the ability to select text on a PDF and copy it to the clipboard, so it’s possible to copy blocks of text from a PDF into a document editor or an email message. The new version of GoodReader also enables users to view or edit all notes, highlights, markups, and drawings created in other applications and properly stored in a PDF file.

Price: $2.99
Category: editing

GravBot 1.0
(ww2.teamphobic.com/games)

GravBot 1.0 is a physics-based puzzle platformer in which the player decides which way is “up” as a little robot falls and pivots through various levels, each of which presents a different challenge. Find the right path and avoid enemies, spike traps, and laser beams. Use levers, buttons, and elevators to solve the puzzles. Because the game is based on physics, the simplest solution isn’t always obvious, so GravBot 1.0 presents a challenge for gamers of all ages.

Price: free
Category: physics

Hello-Hello Chinese App
(www.hello-hello.com)

A Mandarin Chinese–learning course for the contemporary iPad device, the new app offers 30 conversational lessons based on realistic situations and supplemented with hundreds of flash cards containing words and sentences for vocabulary building. Hello-Hello has built the application with advanced audio, beautiful graphics, and a research-based learning methodology to ensure an enjoyable, easy, and fast learning process for every user who is willing to learn Mandarin Chinese.

Price: $9.99 in the iTunes store
Category: Mandarin, languages

HistoryTools 1.5.2
(www.writersdreamtools.com)

This new iPad and iPhone app displays a dayby- day calendar of historical events, the births and deaths of famous people in history, saints’ feast days, and holidays around the world. The entire database is available offline without a Wi-Fi or GPS connection. Users can add their own personal entries. The app’s 14.2 MB database contains 5,700 events, 6,200 birthdays, 4,000 deaths, and 600 date-specific holidays. It can also be used as a diary in which to save one’s own events and important dates, whether they are family birthdays and anniversaries or events in history of special interest to the user.

Price: free
Category: history

iLiveMath Entomology 4.0 for iOS
(www.ihomeeducator.com)

Young children can enjoy the photos and videos shown with this app, which was developed specifically for kindergarten through 7th grade. Early readers can learn about insects, arachnids, and the metamorphosis of butterflies and lady beetles. Higher grades are challenged by mental word problems that require visualizing the basic geometry in insect flight patterns. The app now supports the ability to display the photo and word problem to an entire classroom. It features 100 photos, 40 videos, and a million word problem–answer combinations that teach addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and basic geometry across three levels of difficulty.

Price: $4.99
Category: science

MosaLingua Learn Spanish and French Apps
(www.mosalingua.com)

Intended for English speakers, the app uses an effective and addictive teaching method called the Spaced Repetition System, the latest technology in facilitating memorization. MosaLingua consists of 2,700+ flash cards of words and phrases that include audio pronunciations by native speakers. The cards are classified according to category and level of difficulty. Illustrated dialogues help you learn the key phrases you need in particular situations (context learning). The app also includes learning tips and grammar lessons (including conjugations) that allow you to greatly expand your language skills.

Price: $0.99
Category: languages *you can download the Multitouch Whiteboard Media Kit here: (it contains, 512x512 and 100x100 version of the icon and 6 screenshots) http://www.shiftingmind.com/whiteboard/mediakit.zip

Park Math 1.0 App
(www.duckduckmoosedesign.com)

Featuring seven fun educational activities, the app introduces early math concepts to children in preschool and kindergarten. As children play with Blue Bear and his friends in a park, it teaches counting, addition, subtraction, sorting, and more. The music, arranged and recorded especially for the app, is performed on the cello and the guitar. The app has two levels: Level 1 includes counting up to 20 and addition and subtraction with numbers up to 5, and Level 2 includes counting up to 50 and addition and subtraction with numbers up to 10.

Price: $1.99
Category: math

PhotoToMac 2.0
(www.galarina.eu)

This app for iPhone and iPod touch transfers photos and videos over Wi-Fi to a Mac folder. Transfers can be done in the background on iOS 4. PhotoToMac requires no cables, no Internet connection, no browser, and no emails with attachments. The only requirement is that the iPhone or iPod touch must be on the same Wi-Fi network as the Mac. The app also works on an iPad; it includes support for JPEG photos imported via the iPad Camera Connection Kit.

Price: $1.99
Category: student learning

Ruler 2.0 App
(www.rulerapp.com)

This convenient mobile innovation takes advantage of its non-wood medium to great effect. Save and come back later to see what you measured and when. Convert between inches and centimeters with one tap. Copy and paste values into other apps, like Calculator and Mail. You can even measure long objects by sliding the device and swiping. The app includes a visual guide demonstrating this simple technique.

Price: $0.99 cents; free to upgrade to 2.0
Category: math

Tiny Ocean 1.1 App
(www.milocreative.com)

This educational game keeps children entertained and engaged while they learn new words. Children explore a tropical island and a musical underwater world simply by tapping illustrated pictures to play animations and sounds. There are also interactive Flash Cards in the supported languages. By tapping the microphone, parents and children can record their own voices, which play back both on the Flash Cards and in the ocean, stimulating word association and improving pronunciation and speaking skills. Tiny Ocean is great for teaching languages and currently supports English, Spanish, and Greek.

Price: $1.99
Category: languages

Vernier Video Physics App
(www.vernier.com)

Vernier Software & Technology’s new application allows educators to take the video-analysis power of Vernier’s Logger Pro desktop datacollection software out into the field. The software lets them take a video of an object in motion, mark its position frame by frame, and set up the scale using a known distance. Examples of the app’s use in the field include measuring the velocity of a free-throw shot, a child’s swing, a roller-coaster, and a car. Video Physics then draws trajectory, position, and velocity graphs for the object. It is the perfect tool for teaching two-dimensional kinematics.

Price: free
Category: science

Hardware/AV

Kensington’s PowerBack Battery Case with Kickstand and Dock (www.us.kensington.com) is an all-in-one design that integrates battery charging, a protective casing, a three-position kickstand, and a dock. The built-in charger provides five extra hours of power for the iPad, while the simple slip-on case protects the tablet computer in a compact and easy-to-carry form for use in all environments. The PowerBack’s kickstand adapts to the needs of individual users by offering three convenient viewing modes for the iPad: Portrait mode is best for viewing photos and browsing the Web; landscape mode makes watching videos a joy; and typing mode makes texting and emailing via the iPad easy and comfortable. Other features include built-in speakers and an LED battery fuel gauge.

The CPX8 3LCD video projector (www.hitachi-america.us/digitalmedia) weighs less than five pounds and measures just 12” x 8.7”, so it’s easy to carry and use in varied locations. It offers XGA (1,024 x 768) resolution and 2,700 ANSI lumens brightness and includes HDMI , S-Video, and composite video inputs; RGB computer video inputs and outputs; two audio inputs; and an audio output. The projector has a host of features, including buttons for fast remote-control access to frequently used functions, a customizable blank button for instant control, and a blackboard/whiteboard mode that projects lines for whiteboards and blackboards. It includes a Hybrid Filter that permits 5,000 hours between cleanings and a low noise level of 28 dB.

Peek (www.getpeek.com) is a mobile device that sends and receives email and text messages anywhere in the United States; no Wi-Fi is necessary. With Peek, you can equip faculty, students, and even students’ families with effective communication tools, expand your communication capabilities without adding extra phone lines or Internet connections, and streamline internal operations by enabling everyone in your organization with mobile email and SMS access. Peek also does real-time email, texting, Twitter, and Facebook, as well as location tracking.

NewTek (www.newtek.com) has announced the TriCaster TCXD850 and TriCaster TCXD300, which let users customize their highdefinition live virtual sets. They offer network-style virtual sets developed with proprietary NewTek LiveSet technology. TriCaster VSE is accessed from the HD TriCaster control panel and employs functions familiar to TriCaster users, such as position, scale, rotation, color correction (brightness, hue, contrast, and saturation), a media browser for image selection, and the T-bar for setting custom starting and end points for zooms.

Lutron Electronics Co., Inc. (www.lutron.com) has announced new features that enhance energy savings, control, and security for the GRAFIK Eye QS Wireless. They include optimized dimming for the Cree LR 4 and LR 6 LED loads, a time clock that activates presets and after-hours events on connected Energi Savr Nodes, support for large sensor counts and extended reception, two and three-button Pico controls to provide portable control of a GRAFI K Eye QS, secure access in public locations, and prevention of unauthorized changes in lighting levels and device settings.

NEC Display Solutions of America (www.necdisplay.com) has announced its Portable Series projectors, the M260X, the M260W, and the M300X (shown). Designed to keep audiences engaged during presentations, the value-driven, eco-friendly portable projectors are ideal for education and small- to medium-sized businesses They deliver remarkably bright images and feature wired and wireless (optional) networking, HDMI and USB inputs, high contrast (2,000:1), and 6,000 hours of lamp life (in ECO ModeT). The Portable Series was created with the environment in mind and includes a carbonsavings meter; energy-saving features, such as Power Save (<1-watt in standby mode); quick startup; and direct power-off. And the projectors offer extended lamp and filter life, benefiting classrooms and boardrooms alike.

The clamshell classmate PC design (www. intel.com) features increased ruggedness, longer battery life, improved water resistance, and additional anti-microbial protection. It protects better against damage from falls from up to 70 centimeters (the height of many desks) through improved protection from all angles, an easy-to-grasp handle, a special HDD rubber cage that reduces the impact of physical shocks and vibration, and special LCD rubber protection for minimizing the impact from being dropped or falling. It also features a water-resistant keyboard and an improved antimicrobial coating that protects against bacteria, mold, mildew, fungi, algae, and yeast by creating a surface that retards the growth and colonizing of microorganisms.

Mini Solar Kits (www.owirobot.com) encourage creative thinking, problem solving, and a love of science. A mini solar panel activates their whimsical designs and brings them to life. Children not only learn and experiment with cause and effect but also enjoy hands-on science without the carbon emissions. Powered by sunshine or halogen lighting, the kits are perfect for sparking the imaginations of elementary- and middle-school kids who have little or no kit-building experience. The 6-in-1 Educational Solar Kit allows children to snap together 21 parts to create six working models: an airboat, a windmill, a puppy, and two airplanes.

The Numonics INTELLIBOARD interactive whiteboard (www.numonics.com) allows two students to write on the classroom whiteboard simultaneously during math and science lessons. To differentiate the pens, the second pen operates on a different frequency and is a different color.

The Mighty Scope Pro Pack (www.aveninc.com), a kit with two handheld digital microscopes and a polarizer attachment, is an economical combination for science demonstrations and student use. It enables inspection, analysis, and measurement of magnified images that can be sent to any Windows PC and is suited to biology, earth science, and medical studies. The Pro Pack includes Mighty Scope adjustable from 10x to 200x; Mighty Scope with highest magnification 500x; a polarizer for contrast-enhancing use of the 10x to 200x scope; and accessories for hands-free operation.