wishlist

Wishlist of future updates for Clicker 5
toc The following suggestions have been emailed to the Cricksoft team. If this list generates a new idea for you, please email it to the [|company] (and to me - I'll add your suggestion to this page and hopefully it may generate even more ideas from other visitors!) Alternatively, you may wish to post a message in the Discussion section.

(added 31/5/08)

Reading Coaches
There are many ways to add cues in to a Talking Book which can prompt students to read more strategically. In Clicker 5, the current built in modes are audio files or images. The use of video is currently a third party process. The Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) runs the [|UDL Bookbuilder web site] where visitors can create eBooks based upon the principles of Universal Design. One of the featured tools has the ability to utilize animated characters with text generated speech. The use of these reading coaches can provide multimodal cueing for the activation of reading comprehension strategies. The Logitech web cams featured on the Media page could certainly be used for this purpose but any chance of a future Clicker 5 update including this feature?

(added 26/4/08)

Password Protection
Edit Mode can be hidden from students but this is not a foolproof method of protecting the contents of Grids you have created. The ability to Password Protect a Grid would resolve this issue. Thanks to Ray Mirshahi for this suggestion.

(added 4/4/08)

Flash Objects
The ability to embed a Flash file into a cell opens up a whole new level of interaction on a Grid page. The Clicker file becomes a very powerful Learning Object combined with the capability for students to record or demonstrate their learning in a range of modes.

(added 6/1/08)

Pointer icons
The properties of a cell can be configured to display various pointers (as shown in the screenshot below). In a future upgrade, could some extra icons be added to visually alert the user as to the type of media the cell may activate eg sound/music, a voice recording, video.

(added 29/10/07)

Indigenous language Popup Keyboard
The current Popup keyboard caters for typing of European languages. The creation of other keyboards has been attempted but with limited success. The Pitjantjatjara language contains characters which have a retroflex (an underlined letter). The keyboard cells can be modified to contain an underlined letter but when the keyboard is utilized, the letter is sent in to Clicker Writer or a text box without the retroflex. The use of a retroflex is also an issue when placing whole words in to a cell. A single letter of a word in a cell cannot have a retroflex - the whole word becomes underlined.
 * (10/11/07) - Resolved! Thank you to Crick Tech Support. A procedure to modify the pop-up keyboard is in the Tutorials section.

Spellchecker for Text Boxes
When text is being typed in to a Text Box, the wordprocessor toolbar menu is active above it. This menu does not include a spell check function. Hopefully, this can be added in future updates.

(added 12/10/07)

A-Z Tool for Popup Word Bank
There is an A-Z command which will re-arrange a collection of cells in the grid in to alphabetical order. Could this feature be added to the Popup Word Bank?

Symbolate Tool
To add visual supports to Clicker Writer (or a Text Box), the text needs to be typed in. This can be a lengthy process when wishing to add visual supports to a large body of text. A Symbolate button (like in Boardmaker 6.0) would be beneficial - particularly in those instances when a body of text has been pasted in to Clicker from another source (web page, reference CD, etc).

(added 4/10/07)

Autoshapes pallete
Clicker 5 currently has a standard and an arrows pallete. A third pallete containing a range of transparent autoshapes would be useful. It could have speech and thought bubbles and curved arrows for inclusion in timelines, flow charts (including life cycle charts). It would also be extremely useful if angled arrows were available. eg. these could be used by students in a popup labelling activity requiring them to add the hour and minute hand to a blank clock face to record a specified time.

Popup Video Recorder
This would provide students (including switch users) an intuitive way of inserting a video recording (from a web cam or [|Digital Blue]) in to a specified cell without the need to be in Edit Mode.

Numeracy Recording Templates
A library of images for use in recording numeracy tasks in Clicker Paint would be useful. It could include clock faces, plane and solid shapes, protractors, number charts, number lines and geoboards. A sample collection of numeracy recording templates can be downloaded from the Free Resources section. A sample screenshot below shows some possibilities.

Export audio files
Audio files in Clicker 5 are embedded in a cell and can not be utilized in other applications. An option to export an audio file from a cell and save it as a sound file would allow the audio to be utilized in other applications (including uploading it as a podcast).

Flash files compatibility
It would be great to be able to embed a Flash file on to a page in Clicker 5. Many are very powerful learning objects but I suspect the issue of switch accessibility discounts the use of Flash.

Australian voices
The only way to currently utilize Australian voices in Clicker 5 is to have another application with these voices installed eg [|Read and Write Gold], [|ClaroRead], [|ReadOn] or [|TextAloud]. For budget conscious scenarios, purchasing TextAloud is the best option. Is it possible to have pronunciation editing with SAPI 5 voices available soon?

Scorm Compliance
One of my first thoughts when I started using Clicker 5 was that it was missing the ability to gather assessment data. ClozePro has the ability to do this within the program but I was thinking more along the lines of SCORM compliance. This is a sophisticated feature which may well have to be considered by Crick in a totally new product. It would have an intuitive user environment similar to Clicker where students could type an answer or select an answer in the form of an animation, sound byte, image or even video. The SCORM compliance of the program would then send the results to a database. It would open up the notion of having inclusive software tracking tools built in to the user environment.