Texthelp Read&Write9 Gold

[flyinghaggis]

We're currently running Texthelp Read&Write7 in our school and have had a request from our learning support department to upgrade to the latest version 9.

 

I've had a play with the demo and it looks OK. Seems pretty similar on the face of it to our current version so I'm not really convinced it's worth the money to upgrade. It runs direcly from a network share now which is quite nice as the fact that it required a 500mb install on every PC was our biggest gripe with the previous version.

 

Is anyone currently using this software on their network? If so any feedback would be appreciated,

 

TIA

[penfold]

The biggest difference is probably the inclusion of a screen masking feature. While this is good, there are other software packages which is available which isn't so memory intensive to run.

 

The only gripe I've got is that it seems to loose it's key code for new users. But cancelling the prompt still launches the software and as yet I haven't been able to fix it(due to time and low priority). But then we have this running locally so you might not get that problem with the networked version.

[flyinghaggis]

The biggest difference is probably the inclusion of a screen masking feature. While this is good, there are other software packages which is available which isn't so memory intensive to run.

 

Anything you'd recommend as an alternative?

 

The other gripe about the software is that it's £2000 for a site licence which strikes me a pretty expensive for a text document reader.

[penfold]

If you want to have a look at software to change the background colour, look here screen tinter Lite

 

If you want to look for an alternative to Read & Write, you could try looking at ClaroRead which does very similar thing. I have been told it is slightly cheaper, but haven't looked at networked versions sorry. ClaroRead for PC V5 from Claro Software

[AT_Rainmaker]

I know many schools are switching to WordQ. It is like Texthelp, but it is cheaper and designed to be incredibly easy to use. The students are actually using it, and we are seeing the results in how much they write, and the quality of their writing.

 

There is also a speech recognition add-on, called SpeakQ, that is super simple and works even younger students.