ADVANTAGES FEATURES BENEFITS
If you have not yet explored Live-wire, click here to create a profile and access the FREE demo modules. Then email me: editor@livewirelearning.co.nz for free 10 day licence codes for the subjects and information about a FREE 30 day trial with your class.
BACKGROUND
Live-wire Learning is a New Zealand product developed by a team of established writers and practising New Zealand teachers. Live-wire Learning is owned by iBolte Limited, a limited liability company consisting of Neil Riley (editor and managing director, former Hod English at Southland Boys High School); Clayton Riley (Kip McGrath director and former DP) and Judith Cambridge (Chartered Accountant).
LIVEWIRE'S ADVANTAGES
With over 30 years experience in the classroom as an English and languages teacher, I conceived this programme with my own classroom and teaching programme in mind.
I designed it to
1. Give teachers peace of mind. Access to this high quality learning and revision material means this programme will supplement not supplant your own teaching programme.
2. Help teachers meet the needs of student's different learning styles. Students enjoy interacting with computers and engaging with learning in this medium.
3. Help teachers differentiate their learning programmes to meet the individual needs of students.
3. Strengthen your students' chances of success if used effectively.
4. Provide a way of integrating IT into the teaching and learning programmes of school.
5. Strengthen the link between school and home with regard to homework.
LIVE-WIRE'S FEATURES:
A. Comprehensive Coverage
1. Each subject covers all the externally assessed Achievement Standards, and where practical, some of the Internals. Material can be adapted for unit standards.
2. Comprehensive course coverage: for example, Science has 75 modules of work; Maths NCEA Level 2 has 105 modules of work plus the 45 modules of NCEA Level 1 in revision folders
3. Modules are accessed either by Achievement Standard or by Topic.
4. Large item banks of questions: each module has an item bank of up to 40 questions set at Achieved, Merit and Excellence level. Modules can be done several times; students will encounter new questions and improve their learning.
5. Parallel modules with Achieved-only questions to provide plenty of practice.
6. Revision folders: some subjects like Maths NCEA level 1 and 2, English Year 12 have revision folders containing the previous year's work which facilitates multi-level and differentiated teaching.
7. All subjects contain Definition of Terms modules
8. All subjects have an in-house glossary and access to an on-line dictionary to support learning.
B. Automatic Marking and Assessment
1. Each question is marked automatically.
2. Explanations are available for most marked answers.
3. Live-wire Learning provides adaptive learning (the difficulty level of the questions adjust to the ability level of the student).
4. Questions are formulated to meet the critical thinking, processing and knowledge requirements of Merit and Excellence level answers.
C. Personalised Records of Learning
Each student creates a personal profile which then records and stores the results of every module of work completed. Results can be easily printed off.
D. Flexible Access
1. Live-wire Learning is web based and works best on Internet Explorer.
2. Live-wire is accessible from school and home 24x7 for 365 days so is ideal as a homework tool.
F. Student Administration Suite
The back-end Student Management System (SMS) has features such as:
1. Teachers can import a whole class, create logins and activate a whole class.
2. Teachers can log in under an administrator password to track work and progress, and create reports.
3. Simple reports indicating number of modules attempted, average raw score, working at level will be created for a given period of time.
LIVE-WIRE'S BENEFITS
The programme is designed to save teachers
1. Class time. Live-wire handles the skills revision and practice aspect of learning. It also provides challenging extension material and extends student's higher order thinking skills both for class and home work.
2. Preparation time. Preparation of resources and marking is already done for teachers.
3. Reporting time. Individual printouts of results are available and it is planned to develop a more sophisticated reporting suite.
4. Money. The need for photocopying or to purchase textbooks/workbooks is reduced because there is so much relevant material already on the programme.
