Technology Medley

Scholastic Keys is actually a suite of programs that interface with Microsoft Office, but the programs are designed to be used by young children. The software is installed in the computer labs as well as on all of the laptops on the mobile carts, and I highly encourage you to check it out if you have not already done so. When you click on one of the Keys icons, you will notice that the Office program opens up first, and then the Keys program. Here’s a very brief description of the 3 components:

MaxWrite

MaxWrite is the kids’ version of Word. Students can type, add pictures or borders, work with tables, and do almost anything you might normally have them do with a word processor. They can add images of Clifford or Ms. Frizzle, or they can draw their own pictures right within the program. They can also search for images from the regular Word images search. The documents are saved as a Word format, so they can be opened later on any computer that already has Office installed.

MaxShow

This part of Scholastic Keys is the interface to PowerPoint, and it’s probably my favorite to use with kids in the classroom. This is a wonderful program to use as a culminating event for almost any unit or story. We’ve had third graders create slideshows on their favorite animals, second graders create slideshows of their color poems, fourth graders create word problems shows….you get the idea. The possibilities are endless! After the children enter their information and images into their slides, they enjoy exploring other options such as colors, fonts, and animations to truly personalize their shows.

MaxCount

MaxCount is a spreadsheet program similar to Excel. There are several activities already built into MaxCount that can be used with the very young children. Older kids might enjoy creating multiplication tables or entering data and converting it to graphs. They love the “magic” of filling the columns with fomulas so the computer does the math for them! This is a great program for working with any type of data including practice with mean, median, and mode. It’s also excellent for showing various types of graphs using the same data.

There is a handout for Scholastic Keys in the blue box in the sidebar. Just click on the name of the handout and select download. I’ll be happy to come in and help you any time you want to use this awesome software!