Eye2eye Britain

Overview
This CD-ROM supports many subjects across the Curriculum, but its obvious use is in Geography and History. You are able to search for images, or places associated with people, take a virtual tour of towns, the coast, periods and sides of life. You are able (with the school upgrade version) to then cut and paste images into other presentations, or projects.
There are over 10,000 images with relevant captions contained on the CD-ROM and virtually every town in Britain is covered; children found it very easy to find images of selected towns and import these into other work. The CD-ROM is very easy to use and navigate around with little input required from the teacher. The images are up to date and as a resource for use in schools it has much relevance across many areas.

Installation
The CD-ROM installs quickly and set-up is very simple. When installing the school upgrade, you then have the option to copy all the images onto the hard drive (recommended, as the literature says the program does run quicker) and this only takes a few minutes. It is possible to uninstall the program via the 'add/remove programs' button from the control panel.

At all times the program worked quickly either from the CD-ROM, or when installed onto the hard drive, there were no instances of it crashing. When using the search and/or find menus it again responded quickly.

It caused no conflicts with the machine it was on. However, in the literature accompanying the CD-ROM it mentions a conflict with three button, or wheeled mice, which can stop the program running; there is also information on how to overcome this.

Content
Curriculum Relevance
The obvious use of Eye2eye Britain is in Geography and History as outlined earlier. With the school upgrade comes notes on how it can be used in these and other Curriculum areas such as Art, English Literature and Maths, although some of the ideas suggested are a little tenuous (Millennium Dome - try calculations related to its interesting geometry, or view great artists homes and sights to see what inspired them etc).
The CD-ROM can be used in many of the Primary History and Geography units of the National Curriculum e.g. History 6B and 6C Anglo Saxon and Viking invaders, Geography 4 Going to the seaside, 13 A contrasting UK locality, 23 Investigating Coasts, these to name but a few.
Where the CD-ROM scores so highly is with the quality and number of images it provides to help support the above, along with skills children develop in searching for images, being able to import those chosen into their own presentations right across to the more basic level of navigating around the map with the compass direction buttons.

Design & Navigation
The design of the CD-ROM is excellent and very easy to use. The user guide that comes with it is easy to read and understand and all the children who used it were competent users after a few minutes. On installing the CD-ROM the title loads, the introductory sequence can be bypassed by clicking on the screen and you arrive at the 'Go To' main page. Click on a town name, enter and you are taken straight there.
Most of the other navigation options are done by clicking on icons (usually large); it is possible to return to the main menu page at any time by clicking on the Eye2eye icon.
At no time did children who used it get lost within the program. There is a back button, which takes you back through steps that you have visited.

Ease of Use
The user guide that comes with the program is comprehensive and after a few minutes study, it is very obvious how to use the program.
With only a few options and activities on the CD-ROM it is going to be hard to become confused when using it.
All the children who used it had success at finding the information and images that they were searching for. Colleagues who used the program also commented on how easy it was to use.

Literacy
This is not relevant to this evaluation. There are no obvious links to National Literacy Strategy at Key Stages 1 and 2 apart from the searching for, and locating, information from external sources such as CD-ROMs, found in the Years 5 and 6 Programs of Study.

Special Needs
As already stated elsewhere in this review, it is easy to use the CD-ROM. It is not possible to resize the text on the captions however, because there are only a couple of sentences with each image, children with reading difficulties weren't put off by this and with support were able to cope.

Courseware
There are no exercises offered, for learners to complete with this CD-ROM.

Conclusion
This is an excellent resource for schools that is easy to use. With the school upgrade you are able to cut and paste images into other software. It has images on most towns in Britain, or places nearby if they are too small. Highly recommended for use in schools.

Summary
This is an excellent resource to have available; children across Key Stages 1 and 2 who used it, found it easy to use and extract information. The fact that it is so easy to use makes it such a strong product. Every school would do well to invest in a copy.

Teaching with this Product
This CD-ROM was used with three different age groups for the purpose of the evaluation. A group of Year 5 children were given the CD-ROM to use over a number of lunchtime sessions; they were shown how it worked and then left to find places in Britain that they had either visited, or had connections with. They then had to use found images in a presentation. A second group in different sessions, had to find images of the local area and then find images to the north, south, east and west of our town (some getting as far as the coast), again making a presentation of their results.

All Key Stage 1 children were making a visit to Scarborough and as part of the preparation before the visit, some Year 2 children were given the opportunity to use the CD-ROM to find images of Scarborough and nearby seaside towns. They then had to copy and paste them into a word processor and add captions of their own. They all found it relatively easy to do this and using the compass navigation buttons, navigated to nearby resorts and printed out images from there. A couple of the children also wanted to find images of places that they would pass on the route and using the onscreen map and the search facility, were able to do this with some success.
Year 6 children were visiting the coast as part of 'The Investigating Coasts' topic in Geography; some children used the CD-ROM to take a tour around the coast of Britain to study the different scenery of coasts and others used it to search for images on the area they were to visit.
All the children who used it, including children of widely differing ability, found it easy to use.

Classroom Organisation
The CD-ROM was installed on the school file server and then accessed from there. Key Stage 1 children (half a class) worked in the computer suite with a teacher and classroom support assistant. Year 5 also worked in the suite during lunchtime sessions and the Year 6 children worked on the two machines each class has, four children at a time using the program, whilst the rest of the class worked at other aspects of the topic they were studying.
Once the children were familiar with the program they needed very little help from the teacher in obtaining the information required.

Use of ICT to Achieve Objectives
This is an excellent use of ICT in achieving subject resources. Children can very quickly have good quality images onscreen in front of them. Being able to search for images, or have appropriate categories listed, also makes this a very powerful resource. It may be possible to find similar images on the Internet, but what makes this so good is the speed and ease at which it works.

Using this Product
Using this resource children learn how to search and, if necessary, refine the search; they learn how to cut and paste, as well as how to navigate around using menu buttons. All along I felt that the children who were using the CD-ROM from age 8 through to 11, were not just learning from it, but their ICT skills were improving as well.

Monitoring & Assessment
All the children who used the CD-ROM achieved their intended goals and did it easily and with little if any, input from the teacher. As stated elsewhere, as the CD-ROM was so easy to use the children were not frustrated, but motivated and this led to them improving their own ICT skills.

Special Needs
All the children who used it, including those with Special Educational Needs, found it very easy to use. The navigation was not complicated and the captions of only a couple of sentences in length, making it easy for children with reading difficulties to read. Because it is so easy to use, all who use it will experience success with it.