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New York City
December 2002

Thinkwave Educator
By Mitchell Levine

Although a few New York City schools are still struggling to meet the October 2001-dated mandates, the vast majority of our districts now have networks and broadband access capabilities which were only available to higher education a brief time ago. Unfortunately, without enterprise software capable of attaining the ultimate goal of complete interactive communication between parents, students, and teachers online, the $1.1 billion investment in hardware the Department of Education (and the old Board of Ed.) has made is useless. In fact, many institutions in the city try to provide the functionality of a specialized utilities suite by simply jury-rigging Microsoft Office components into a loose-fitting configuration as a stop-gap.

That’s no longer necessary because Thinkwave Software has produced an integrated, reasonably priced solution, their Thinkwave Educator and Thinkwave Administrator applications. After downloading the trial version of the Educator software, I was quickly able to create a gradebook for a (fictitious) class in minutes, complete with an attendance list, a syllabus, course objectives, grades, reading lists, and more. With a single click, I then immediately posted the entire thing on the Thinkwave Grades Online site. A simple security code would allow parents and students to thereby access crucial class information. Not only was the process easy and relatively painless, but additionally also highly customizable, even allowing, for example, non-traditional letter grading systems like the new protocol introduced this year. Teachers with extensive enrollments will greatly appreciate the powerful import/export function, which is capable of subsuming current data lists from popular database applications like Microsoft Access and Filemaker Pro.

For less than a hundred dollar initial investment, as well as an approximately five dollar monthly fee to subscribe to the site, any educator in either the public and private schools can reap the benefits of the vanguard expansionism of the last several years of institutional technology procurement, as well as set an example of how best to use its attendant resources.

Although I was not able to survey the Thinkwave Administrator product in time for this review, which, according to the manufacturer, allows for school and district-wide implementation, if it’s anywhere near as seamless, feature-rich, and easy-to-use as the Educator suite, I feel confident that it should be given due consideration by all progressive 21st century education professionals. A free trial version of both products can be downloaded at the company’s site, www.thinkwave.com.#

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Education Update, Inc., P.O. Box 20005, New York, NY 10001.
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All material is copyrighted and may not be printed without express consent of the publisher. © 2002.


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