2002 Boardmaker

[Guest guest]

F.Y.I. . .

The Newest PC Version of Boardmaker

The New Boardmaker has so many powerful features for creating new symbols. It

has features of the paint program incorporated into Boardmaker itself. So you

can change the colors of the colored symbols from within the program in seconds!

I turned the horse blue for the " Brown Bear " story with 4 mouse clicks. You

can also use the draw feature to draw more than straight lines over existing

symbols. For example, I drew a bunch of crazy jack-o-lantern faces on the

plain pumpkin symbol. You can even flip/ rotate the symbols from left to

right, up/down, and in degrees. You can see all of the picture libraries

onscreen at one time in thumbnails, and can click away and fill your board

without toggling back and forth to your draw window. (And you can see all

the symbols for " play " at once!) And you can have multiple boards open at

one time so you can copy and paste among them; you can make 6 lotto boards

onscreen at once and just move the location of your symbols!

It also has 20 blank " categoriese " that you can easily customize as your own,

and I store all of my new symbols there. Another feature that has saved me so

much time.....when you have a symbol in your symbol finder window, you click

next to where you typed in the name for your search, and all the synonyms for

that symbol appear in a pop-up menu. So you can select another name for that

symbol by simply highlighting it from the menu. And you can add your own name

to the synonym list by simply typing it in!

So " Person 28 " can also be named for one of your students without going through

the " Copy, Paste, Change Name Routine " . If you use the black and white

symbols, and then color the background of the cell, they stay nontransparent

(the inside of the symbol stays white to improve visual contrast.) Finally, you

can save your own blank boards as templates that cannot be changed. When you

open them, the program forces you to " Save as " so your templates remain blank

for evryone to use.

I teach Boardmaker lab classes in both Mac and PC formats. Unfortunately,

Mayer- has no plans currently to incorporate these powerful new

features into their Mac version. I hope they will reconsider, because I can

create boards in much less than half the time with these new features.

I also heard that the price for both versions of Boardmaker is going to

be reduced in the new 2002 catalog, so ask about the new price if you are

ordering!