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Review of Jigworks from Crick Software, February 2005
Reviewed by Gerry Kennedy – IT Computer Consultant and Trainer in Education

Jigworks

For MS Windows 98 through XP Operating Systems

Jigworks V1.0 from Crick Software

Jigworks provides a range of pre and early reading activities for children all abilities. It caters directly to the early years classroom and to students with special needs. Jigworks is flexible and offers a number of innovative tools. The packaged activities provided in menus such as Knowledge About the World, Literacy, My Activity Sets and Numeracy, offer a wide and comprehensive range of both pre-reading and early reading activities. Jigworks addresses skills ranging from matching and identifying shape to picture and word matching. It also caters right up to early word-level reading skills.

Jigworks was essentially designed for early years students as well as learners in higher grades with special needs. It works by users dragging a defined number of jigsaw pieces. One of the great key features and benefits is that the user does not need to hold the mouse button down. This assists users who are struggling with a mouse and caters to students who may be using a joystick or trackball. As with all well designed assistive software, Jigworks is fully switch accessible for those who cannot use a mouse, trackball or Touchscreen.

The comprehensive sound support makes this an ideal tool for students with English as a second language. The voices used are clear, well articulated and easy to understand. All activities are introduced in voice upon starting the page e.g. On the Seaside, At the Island, In the Jungle etc. Letters numbers or words are voiced if they are used in an activity. As the user clicks text, it is voiced. When a sentence is completed (in the literacy section) the entire sentence is voiced upon successful completion.

How it Works

Every activity page takes up the full screen. Before choosing an activity a program menu bar is situated at the very top of the screen (see diagram to the left). A left facing green arrow navigates the user back, the right facing green arrow forward. An up facing arrow navigates Up with the icon of a house taking you to the Home page. A “Current location“ drop down window shows you quickly where you are in the program (i.e. it drops down and shows you which sub menu you are currently working with).

Sub menus appear at the start of each section e.g. Literacy. A selection menu appears after you click once on your selection e.g. High Frequency Words. A new screen appears with a coloured background. Four icons appear at the top right hand corner of the page or screen.

These include:

A white cross in a red circle	Close activity and return to the sub menu screen
A red right facing triangle	Play or start the page
A blue right facing arrow	Move to the next page (or activity)
A blue left facing arrow	Move back to the previous activity

Navigation is intuitive, easy to learn and master and the program is fully switch accessible. The icons are easily discernible and after a little practice students will feel very comfortable moving forwards and back through the various levels and activity screens. To exit an activity, you can also use the Escape key on the keyboard.

The activity menus and items are displayed in a large, light blue coloured text. To choose or select an activity group or single activity, you need to click once on the underlined text.

Types of Jigsaw

There are two kinds of jigsaw – interlocking and custom. Ready-made jigsaws of both types are included, and it is very easy to create your own. The samples provided are useful straight out of the box. All activities provide ideas, layouts, colour schemes and types of exercises that classroom teachers and support staff or parents might like to emulate and copy, until they are confident to try to design their own.

Interlocking jigsaws can be made in seconds using any picture. Pictures can be taken from the picture library of 1000 pictures included with the program, from other picture libraries, or from your digital camera. Simply choose the picture and say how many pieces you want the jigsaw to have (anything from 4 to 64). You can optionally include sounds to be played when the jigsaw is started, when it is completed, and when pieces are picked up and placed. These sounds can also be voice files, sound effects, music or instructions.

With a custom jigsaw, you can choose which pieces of the picture you want to cut out, and these can be any shape. You can cut out simple shapes from a plain background for early shape matching, or you can cut out objects from a digital photograph. You can even place symbols on top of a picture and cut out the symbols. Users of Boardmaker or owners of PECS will enjoy this feature. You can import images from other clip art libraries or convert pictures, photos, maps and drawings as well as include media from other locations (e.g. CD ROM libraries, Encyclopaedias, school servers).

The text tool enables you to add text and automatically cut out individual letters, whole words, or parts of words to make your pieces. You can attach different sounds to each individual piece of your jigsaw (either use the sounds included, or record your own), so you can create wonderful early reading activities. You can make onset and rime jigsaws, or puzzles where you piece together the letters of a student’s name, favourite animal or street name. The activities can be partially or fully supported by sound.

Jigsaws can be put together into sets, so that a student can work through a sequence of related activities. Children can work independently through the whole set, or you can work in a group, or even with the whole class, using an interactive whiteboard.

Features in Jigworks

Any picture or photograph can become a Jigworks activity.

1. Using scanned pictures, photos or other images:

• Simply open your picture and highlight the areas you want to make into pieces.

• Make activities using pictures of your school or your local area or to fit any topic in your classroom

• Use pictures from events at school or on camps, excursions or field trips and design activities for spelling, retelling a story, vocabulary building and sequencing, as well as for matching exercises.

2. Create your own interlocking jigsaws

• Interlocking jigsaws can be made quickly using any picture or graphic that you have stored on a floppy, hard disk or CD ROM.

• Pictures can be taken from the picture library of 1000 pictures included with the program, or from other picture libraries, or from your digital camera, network server, or acquired from a web site (NOTE: Be mindful of and pay attention to the prevailing copyright restrictions and protocols).

3. Shape matching

• Create a series of activities using pictures, drawings or photos. Build up a picture then identify shapes. Use the shapes so that students must locate and reposition them correctly in the original picture or drawing.

4. Early number skills

• Use number activities to practice number recognition, number order and counting. Children can practice and become familiar with numbers. They can use Jigworks to count the objects as they place them and learn one-to-one correspondence. It becomes a more meaningful activity when they are actually manipulating the numbers. Words or objects

• You can link activities for a sequence of counting pages and thus create a small lesson group of similar activities to follow a theme or concept

5. Word-level work

• Use digital photographs to create personal activities for each student or create a group or class category for all students to access and use.

• Add text and the word or letters can be automatically made into pieces, so that children can learn to recognise and spell their name, their new spelling or theme words.

• In a special class or setting, functional words could be practiced with direction from teacher aides and other support staff or visiting volunteers or parents.

6. Sorting

There is a sorting activity are provided with the program. Jigworks activities can enhance any curriculum area and are flexible I that the software can be used across a number of curriculum areas.

Jigworks can be used for:

• Pre Skilling and rehearsal
• Practice
• Refining skills already taught in the classroom
• Spelling and Word Building
• Word Recognition (in context with picture support)
• Using photographs for pre symbol recognition and awareness
• Using photographs to retell or sequence stories
• Sentence reconstruction
• Sorting
• Matching
• Labelling pictures and words
• Jigsaw creation and solving

NETWORKING IN SCHOOLS

All of Crick Software products are network friendly. To purchase for a network, you need to buy the single user product, then purchase the number of additional licences (i.e. to match the number of computers running the program) that are required. The CD ROM disk includes a network installation.

System Requirements

The basic system for Jigworks using an MS Windows PC includes:

• Pentium II 200 or greater
• 32MB RAM (Recommended 256 at least if using MS Windows 2000 or XP)
• 50MB hard disk space
• Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP

Users can access Jigworks by using a mouse, trackball, joystick or keyboard (QWERTY, mini large (BigKeys or expanded keyboard such as IntelliKeys. It caters particularly well to Touchscreen and Touch Windows.
Note: Single Switch users will require a switch interface.

Jigworks Training Booklet

This booklet demonstrates how Jigworks can be used to create a wide variety of literacy activities to support learning across the curriculum. It will save staff and users time and effort by clearly showing how to use the tools and features in the software.

The booklets guides you step by step, with illustrations, through Jigworks and guides you as to how it operates. You will be able to quickly create and implement the program using your own activities.

Crick Software Titles

Other products from Cricksoft include the ubiquitous Clicker 4 and Clicker 5 as well as the free learning grids for all curricula. These are downloadable freely from www.learninggrids.com.

There are numerous books and resources that work within the various Clicker versions