GEOSKILLS Reviews

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The following are selected comments from three reviews of Geoskills.  The full reviews may be found at New Horizons (http://www.nh.com.au/home.html) and searching for Geoskills.

Interaction (Journal of the Geography Teachers Association of Victoria Inc.)
Interaction, Vol 28, No4, Dec 2000, pp 42-43

The application itself is very easy to use and you really only need to be familiar with using a mouse to successfully use this CD-ROM.  
This CD-ROM is a very useful resource for allowing students to explore spatial data themselves or as support for other materials that can be presented to a class as a whole. It could be used individually, as the basis of a unit on spatial data, or to support various topics associated with spatial data.
Geoskills is a resource that could be used across the geography curriculum at a range of levels, from Year 7 to 10.

Simon Haigh
Camberwell Grammar School 

Uniserve Science(http://www.usyd.edu.au/su/SCH/)

This is an excellent CD-ROM that clearly introduces concepts about how to represent the earth, and spatial features upon it, through the use of maps and computers. Its innovative animations are used with great skill to drive home many difficult concepts. It also has a sprinkling of calculations and exercises for students to be challenged by, although there are never too many of these, and they never form an insurmountable barrier to continued progress.
The latter's innovative way of presenting material is sometimes remarkable.

Ray Wyatt, The University of Melbourne

 Cartography (Journal of the Mapping Sciences Institute Australia)
Cartography, Vol 29, No 2, December 2000, pp 99-100 

To start off it gets a big tick for being an Australian product. It arrived in the typical jewel CD-ROM case. I expected to find an instruction booklet inside the front cover but there was none. The only instructions were three short paragraphs on the back cover. One paragraph for starting in Windows, one paragraph for starting using Macintosh and paragraph noting that worksheets were available on the CD in Adobe Acrobat format. Geoskills can be run directly from the CD-ROM or be installed on the hard drive. Surprisingly, starting Geoskills and running it from the CD-ROM was as simple as those short instructions. I’m a skeptic after several experiences with other “easy to install” CD’s which took hours to figure out. Geoskills loaded and worked perfectly on both my PC and my wife’s Mac.
Within the chapters students will find interactive exercises to check their understanding of the point just covered. Correct answers are immediately acknowledged. The system allows for two incorrect answers to be entered before providing a “Hint” as to how to solve the problem. A third incorrect answer results in the correct answer and calculations being displayed. Immediate reinforcement is a good teaching technique for a correct response and explanation of the solution for an incorrect response.

Paul Livingstone, National Library of Australia

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Geography and Planning,
School of Human & Environmental Studies,
University of New England,
Armidale, N.S.W. 2351, Australia.

Phone +61 267 73 2696  Fax +61 267 73 3030
Home +61 267 72 5121
E-mail ajones@pobox.une.edu.au

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