Interactive CD-ROMs from the Ministry

I have been doing a bit of work lately for the Learning Support centre at school, They had sent to them from the Ministry of Education an interactive CD-ROM and needed to get it loaded onto the network for it to be able to be used in all classes, and not have to install it on separate machines. Easy enough to do with a network share. But that is not all.

I then started to do some research and found that the Ministry had sent a number of these CD-ROMs out to schools for the past five years. The question was, what are they and where are they.

An example of the CD-ROM The Game and other stories, this was the first one that was sent out in 2002.

An introduction about the CD-ROMs follows
The CD-ROM and has been distributed to all New Zealand full primary, intermediate and secondary schools. The Teachers' Notes booklet that came with the CD-ROM made links to the curriculum, provided ideas for introducing texts, follow-up discussions, and related learning experiences.

The CD-ROM had a positive impact on students' attitudes to reading and students' reading achievement as

• students' oral reading fluency and confidence improved significantly;
• it engaged students' interest for the entire four-week period;
• the students rated their enjoyment and interest in using the CD more highly than their other school reading experiences;
• students' motivation to read the CD-ROM texts carried over into lessons based on these texts; and
• most students considered that their reading had improved since using the CD-ROM.

The teachers were enthusiastic about

• the potential of the CD-ROM to engage and support reluctant readers; and
• the relevance of the CD-ROM to the target audience of Māori and Pasifika boys, and its potential appeal to other groups of students, including girls.

Listed on the website and available from learning media

Interactive CD-ROMs for years 7–10

• The Game and other stories, item 26577 (2002)
• Swimming with Sharks and other stories, item 27494 (2003)
• Punk Junk Mailer and other stories, item 30088 (2004)
• Taiaha and other stories, item 30864 (2005)
• Creepy and Other stories, item 31375 (2006)
• Just Swallow the Camera, item 31987 (2007)
  

We are now looking at getting some of the younger ones designed for years 5-6 as well to help those low level readers.
What an idea this has given me for my students to do an achievement standard, we have many school journals here at school, how about getting the students to create their own interactive CD-ROM in macromedia flash.

Note: I have managed to find 5 out of the 6 CD-ROMs within the school, just working on getting Taiaha and other stories.
But it does raise the point, why haven't these CD-ROMS been made available before, they started arriving in 2002 and we get one each year. It doesn't take a lot of effort to make these things available school wide. A quick copy/paste and create a shortcut, put the shortcut into the management console, and the next time a student login, it is there, ready to be used.
I wonder what else is around the place that I can get going. Or is that someone else's job.

Note 2: The rest of the missing CD-ROMs arrived today and have been installed. So now all the years 7-10 have been installed and two of the Years 5-6 CD-ROMs are running on the network, as well as links provided on the network for teachers laptops being able to run them.