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Easiteach Literacy Overview
Easiteach Literacy provides a set of tools that support the teaching of literacy at word,
sentence and text level in a whole-class or group teaching environment and with both
Primary and Secondary age pupils.
Easiteach Literacy is made up of two elements:
Easiteach Literacy Tools - a simple to use, interactive teaching tool for whole-class
teaching. Many of the tools are also useful on desktop computers and can help with
the preparation of literacy teaching materials.
The Easiteach Literacy Content Pack is available for Primary schools and contains
a collection of ready-made activities, simulations, models and resources, designed to
help save teachers' time in lesson preparation.
How Can Easiteach Literacy Help You?
 Easiteach Literacy can be used on any whole-class-teaching technology, such as interactive whiteboards (from any supplier), on large screen monitors or plasma displays and also with remote graphics Tablets and Tablet PCs. It can also be used on desktop PCs. This enables schools to standardise on their choice of whole-class-teaching software in order to minimise the number of learning curves faced by teachers and also to enable the sharing of pre-prepared resources.
Easiteach Literacy Toolbar
 The Easiteach Literacy tools have been designed to be appropriate for both primary and secondary schools. They specifically help with the teaching of literacy at word, sentence and text levels. The 'split-screen' feature allows you to display text on one page and to drag words or blocks of text to another page for editing or reformatting.
The resources available in the toolbar are:
Timer
Class and group activities can easily be timed at the click of a button!
Repel Text
Text can easily be aligned with the edge of an image, or other text, so that it will wrap around it.
 Word and Sentence Builder Cards
These can be used to teach phonics, spelling and grammar. Cards with common words or parts of words can be selected and then placed on the screen. The cards 'snap' together to make whole words or whole sentences. There is a range of ready-made cards provided but you can also make up your own. The colour of the cards can be changed once on the screen, to focus pupils on common sounds or words, for example.
Writing Frame
Text can be placed in a writing frame, which can then be placed around an image or other text to create easily identifiable sections.
Punctuation Bank
This tool can be used to input punctuation into any text. You can also remove all punctuation from any text, including material that has been pasted into Easiteach from the internet or elsewhere. By selecting parts of a text and removing the punctuation, focus can be drawn to that specific area.
 Word Reader
Using this tool the software will read out single words or whole passages of text in a variety of different accents and styles.
Cloze
Cloze activities can easily be created using this tool. Selected words will be taken out of any text and stored in a word bank for later use. Words can be typed into cloze spaces or 'dragged' from the Word Wallet, or from another page. This works particularly well in Split Screen mode. Words can also be entered from the Literacy Word Bank.
 Highlight Tools
Allows you, or a pupil to tag word types in different colours by simply selecting a highlighter colour and clicking on the words to be tagged.
 Big Edit
The Big Edit tool is designed to help teach pupils about the value of the editing process in improving a piece of text. A text (e.g. a sentence or phrase) is first selected within an Easiteach page. When the Big Edit tool is selected from the literacy toolbar, the selected phrase will appear at the top of the Big Edit window. The phrase can then be repeatedly edited and each edited version can be compared with the original phrase. The final version of the sentence or phrase is then pasted back into the original text.
Typeface
This tool allows you to edit text, as in any word processing package, but also to add speech to simple words or longer passages.
Easiteach Literacy Content
To use the Content Packs you must already have Easiteach installed on your computer. To get the most out of the content pack we recommend the Easiteach Literacy Tools are also installed.
Literacy Content Pack
Specifically for use with Primary age pupils. The pack includes:
- 85 lessons written by leading educationalists
- Over 100 texts from leading publishers
- Word lists, including Phonics words (Phonemes, Clusters and Vowels), Sight words, Spelling word banks and Topic words
- More than 50 ready made writing frames
Content Pack Index Page
- Access to Text resources, Lesson activities or Writing Frames
Lesson Activities
Easibooks contain teaching screens and accompanying notes with full reference to:
- Teaching guide for each screen
- Effective questioning of pupils during Activities
- Key vocabulary
- Ideas for extension activities
- Tips for the plenary session
Text Resources
The text resources within Easiteach Literacy include a range of both fiction and non-fiction texts provided by leading UK publishers, OUP and Hamilton.
Writing Frames
They cover a wide variety of fiction and non-fiction areas and will allow you to support pupil's independent writing.
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