Make-A-Book 2.0

PC version requires:
Windows 3.1 or later, 486, 16MB RAM, CD-ROM, 25MB HD

Mac version requires:
Mac versions available

Description:

Make-A-Book is intended to help teachers and students create books and enhance writing skills. It is designed to integrate fully with other TSS programs, such as: Worksheet Magic Plus, Make-A-Flash, Language Experience Recorder and Word Works Vocabulary Series.

The Class Manager allows teachers to set up classes, listing student's names for each class. With this feature, a student can log in, work on his/her own book and save the book under his/her name. This program offers all the usual features of a word processor program, such as: various fonts, text color, text size and text alignment. Users can format their own book by choosing small, medium or large book sizes and portrait or landscape orientation. The program will automatically set up the book to print so that it can be easily folded and bound. The speech feature will even read words, sentences or the entire book aloud.

Features:

• Instruction manual and onscreen help
• Class manager
• Clip art images
• Spell check and thesaurus
• Talking word processor reads back text

Technical Aspects:

I did find a couple of bugs in this program. First, the spell checker missed two very simple misspellings (the words were day and of). It caught several other misspellings and offered correction suggestions; but I was concerned that if these two words were missed, the spell checker may not be very reliable. Second, I was not successful at importing clip art from other areas of my hard drive. Perhaps this was a conflict unique within my own system, but I would not feel comfortable being limited only to the images included in the Make-A-Book program.

Report and Conclusions:

I was disappointed about a few aspects of this program, two of which I listed under Technical Aspects. Most of the clip art in Make-A-Book is either pre-colored or shaded, so if you are an early childhood teacher intending to make books for young children to color, you are out of luck. Also, I was not happy with the way the pages were printed for binding. I would prefer to bind the book differently, but with this program I have no choice.

In conclusion, my 8-year-old has enjoyed writing and publishing his own books with this program and both my children think it is fascinating that the computer can "read" to them. I hope I have supplied enough pros and cons about this product to help you decide whether it is right for you.