Home Library Product Reviews

Download/view the PDF version

Review of ClozePro – March 2005
For MS Windows 98 through XP Operating Systems and MAC OSX
Author: Gerry Kennedy ICT Consultant in Education and Assistive Technology

ClozePro from Crick Software

ClozePro is another excellent program from the makers of Clicker 5. It provides educators and parents with ready-made activities for all students of all abilities. The program allows you to design and create your own custom cloze activities using your own text, or text from third party sources. ClozePro is targeted at students in early childhood classes through to secondary. Essentially ClozePro is designed to assist in the development of early concepts and literacy. It has built in text-to-speech and has a vibrant, colourful look and feel.

ClozePro is the newest addition to the Crick Software family of literacy products. Essentially, it provides a range of exciting and stimulating age and interest activities for learners of all ages and abilities and caters to all curricula content.

Cloze activities help young learners and students with high literacy needs practice with their word recognition and prediction skills. Cloze software is powerful and has proven to be one of the most successful tools for helping students as they enjoy completing the activities. It is deemed as a ‘fun’ exercise and a challenge. With ClozePro, they can take as long as they wish and there are no negative responses or feedback. This program is the one of the leading software tools for making cloze activities. Most importantly, it can be used to compliment and support any curriculum area.

Users who have previously experienced and enjoyed Clicker 5 or Wordbar will find the software interface very familiar. Grids are created automatically and are supported with digital speech. Linked activities that students can work through at their own pace can be quickly designed and created from activities in the program, downloaded from the Cricksoft site or made by staff or students.

Students need only click on letters, words or phrases in the grid to fill the highlighted gap in the text. Alternatively, they can type
from the keyboard. Students with different access methods can work alongside each other. A teacher assistant may have the keyboard with the student using a mouse or trackball and they can work together, one guiding the other. Users simply click on whichever gap they wish want to complete. You can complete any gap in any order.

The built in activities are ready to use. The ones you make are incredibly easy to set up – just copy and paste text into ClozePro and then take out every third or fifth word, or specify the number of words to remove – it only takes a few clicks. Educators can be more selective and highlight the exact text they wish to remove. This can be words, phrases, or groups of letters. Teachers and support personnel can take text from the students’ current topic or class theme. It is a matter of simply copying text from a web page or MS Word document. ClozePro provides structured reports for you to track a student’s progress in the activities, including information on the prompts used and the attempts made. These can be printed or copied to other reporting or assessment programs.

ClozePro also comes with high-quality software speech so users can hear the words in the grid, or the activity text, before they respond. They can rehearse and check all of the grid words before they start. They can check their answers before they finish. ClozePro comes with the Crick Picture Library to illustrate the activities. You can also use your own pictures. See our graphics and symbols section for additional picture libraries.

NOTE: Speech voices for other languages are also supported. This is great news for LOTE and situations where English is a second language.

Grid Support

A grid can be displayed along the side or as a popup window. It can also appear and be accessed from the bottom section of the screen. Gaps can be shown in a variety of styles, including the option to show the shape of the word. This can help students with sight words and spelling. You can place pictures or symbols in the gaps.

The gaps can be filled in any order, in any time frame. Students therefore can make the best possible use of any context cues or complete the activity initially using trial and error techniques or process of elimination. Upon successful completion, they could attempt the activity again onscreen or on paper as revision.

ClozePro is ideal for creating whole lessons on a particular group of words, for comprehension or text response or as a vocabulary building exercise. Students can work through a series of linked activities. The built in diagnostic feature in ClozePro tracks everything each student does whilst working at the computer. Educators can later access a full report for any student at any time, either on a stand-alone computer or across an entire school network. This enables teachers and speech pathologists to diagnose reading problems and track individual progress and thus determine whether other interventions are necessary. Busy teachers need not always directly monitor students working as they can rely on critical data to support their teaching as it is captured and stored by ClozePro. In large classes, or across an entire year level, this can assist in identifying the success of the teaching strategies and methods and thus the learning outcomes of the students.

ClozePro caters and accommodates the needs of small target groups. When it used with an Interactive Whiteboard the powerful features are very evident. It offers a rich language development opportunity where students can discuss possible answers and argue their case. The collaborative aspect of building activities with students, or completing as a group or class invites participation, discussion and debate.

The Interactive Whiteboard is an ideal tool for teachers and students alike as they dynamically work together to find a solution to a problem or complete activities in teams, racing against each other or a timer. ClozePro challenges could be set up with one class or year level against another. This can create additional awareness of its capacities to motivate and invite extra effort from students who normally struggle or fail in literacy. Given practice beforehand, they can compete in a fun activity against their peers. There are so many ways in which ClozePro can be used informally in classrooms or in formal lessons in literacy sessions or in other subjects. You can even set tests or small multiple-choice exams using ClozePro in history or geography classes.

Create Your Own Activities

Teachers and other educators can quickly create a cloze activity with just a few mouse clicks. After completing one or more activities, they can be immediately used by students onscreen or printed it as a worksheet for class use away from the computer, for practice, revision or for homework. ClozePro can be used with the whole class, for small groups who require extra help or tailored to individual students who have additional needs or learning difficulties.

ClozePro can be used straight after installation. The Tour is extremely useful as it contains activities that teachers and students can complete in minutes. Handy hints and additional information is provided in pop up windows. You do, as you learn! To complete an exercise, you can click on a word (or words) in a grid or type text from your standard keyboard.

To design and create your own activity later, simply type or paste some text, choose the words you want to remove. Save and then run your activity or print a worksheet for your individual students or for a whole class, year level or ability group. The great benefit of open-ended software is that educators can quickly edit an activity in order to make different versions to cater to students who have different ability levels.

In the software educators can remove (or cloze):

• Whole words,
• Phrases,
• Parts of words
• Individual letters or numbers.

This text can be from any source. Teachers can acquire text from

• Scanned books, newspapers, articles, journals or worksheets on paper
• The internet from appropriate websites to compliment their curriculum
• Encyclopaedias and atlases
• Resource CDs and DVDs
• E-book web sites on the web (e.g. www.gutenberg.org)
• From education based resource web sites
• From MS Word or other word processing files that they have typed or acquired
• From other specific curriculum resources
• From other literacy products, spelling programs or talking books

Teachers can use pictures including photos, drawings, maps or symbols with speech support to help younger or struggling readers. More powerful applications of the program include designing and creating multiple-choice tasks for older learners or activities that have challenging vocabulary or multiple cloze areas in sentences.

ClozePro in the Classroom

It caters to and matches the learning styles and needs of students in the Early Years classroom. Younger students, or those with special learning needs in more senior classes, can simply start with picture matching and single letter or word based cloze activities and then gradually build skills and confidence to work with early word recognition.

In the primary classroom, ClozePro can be used with all students of different abilities. It is an deal tool for all literacy work as it gives practice and reinforcement to support other classroom activities. Younger learners may require and elect to use picture and/or speech support. More capable students can focus on longer, more complex texts or extended vocabulary. Prompts can be introduced in an activity to provide additional support for those who wish to run the same content, but who need assistance. The flexible design and layout features of ClozePro ensure that children are using the software at the most appropriate level.

In middle years and especially in secondary or high schools, teaching staff can create activities for all curriculum areas. It is a perfect tool for students who need to practise and reinforce prior learning or to test their skills and understandings. Multiple choice tasks and exam revision exercises can be created that cover any topic or subject area. Individualised exams can then be simply new versions of the activities with modifications or additional features made available e.g. text to speech option or use of photos or graphics.

Crick Software has always been strongly linked to and mindful of students who have additional needs, both access and learning needs. ClozePro is ideal for any special needs context as it offers built in With speech and picture support. If students have used Clicker 4 or Clicker 5, they will be confident users of ClozePro and will be able to navigate the program and use the grids. Activities can be easily differentiated and tailored to each students specific access requirements and learning style. In special settings and in mainstream schools, some switch users are often compromised as they are provided with more specific programs that are switch capable. ClozePro is switch accessible out of the box, so it caters directly to students unable to use a keyboard, touch window, joystick or mouse.

Supporting Educators

A key element and feature in ClozePro is the reporting aspect of the program. As each student is able to log on, structured reporting is provided for teachers so as to track each student’s progress. To accomplish this, the teacher need only click the report menu and get an instant report on the student’s’ activity. It comprehensively includes the prompts required and all of the attempts made.

This handy facility ensures that teachers can follow an each student’s progress through the activities on the computer. Activities can be printed so as to rehearse and practise of the computer, or to be used as revision and testing after the activities have been attempted at some later time. In order to cater to individual learning needs, teachers can easily differentiate activities in one or more of the following ways:

• Change the gap style for more or less support
• Simplify the text, or remove fewer or different words
• Make the text more complex or include longer sentences
• Use extended vocabulary and introduce topic, thematic or spelling words and embed them in the text
• Break the text up into smaller parts, so that the student is presented with a small chunk of text at a time
• Modify the amount of support given by the prompts
• Enable speech support or picture support
• Limit or extend the number of words offered in the grid
• Offer distractors in the grid

• Turn-off the grid for keyboard access only

The program has therefore been designed to be amenable and flexible. It provides different ways to help educators customise relevant and motivating activities. The class or year level can all work on the same theme or topic, but students with different abilities and skills can feel confident that they are included and valued. They are completing work with their peers and being made to feel part of the class. Modifying content is usually very time consuming. Support personnel such as teacher aides and teacher assistants can help structure the activities to support the students who require extra support. Speech pathologists can work alongside teachers to modify content so as to reflect their therapy goals.

ClozePro fills a void that has existed for a while in educational software. Other programs have come and gone, but none have so comprehensively covered the multiplicity of features needed so that cloze exercises can be generated quickly, from any source, with speech and image support. The program is very intuitive, simple to navigate and is consistent with other popular genres of software.

It will soon appear on the ‘must have’ lists of literacy and even general software support lists in school budgets as it does what the authors have intended to do so well. Version 1.5 has additional features that make it a stand out package, and one that will be valued in every classroom. Free 30 day trial demonstration copies are available and the online examples at www.learninggrids.com are free to download and use immediately after installation.

---

Networking in Schools

All of Crick Software’s programs can be used and installed across a school network. To purchase copies of ClozePro for a network, simply buy the single user product, then add and pay for the number of additional user licences required. The ClozePro CD includes a network installation option.

Access Methods

Users can access ClozePro using a standard mouse, trackball or joystick. A standard or mini/expanded keyboard as well as touch screen or touch window with operate the software.. It is fully single and multiple switch capable. Note: You may require a switch interface (e.g. Crick USB Switch Interface).

Support

A useful ClozePro Training Booklet is also available. The booklet covers the skills necessary to use ClozePro to make resources suitable for learners of all abilities. The Cricksoft web site also has support materials, downloads and fact sheets to assist users with ClozePro (as well as other popular software titles including Wordbar, Clicker 4 and Clicker 5 as well as Jigworks, Daisy, The Gnu Series and the Find Out and About Series.

All purchasing, costs and site licence information as well as reviews and support information for Australian and New Zealand users is available at www.spectronicsinoz.com.

Help is Always Available

There is a very useful Quick Tour. The Help Topics option in the Help menu follows through from Introducing ClozePro, Getting Started, Leaving ClozePro, Frequently Asked Questions, to Contacting Cricksoft. It offers a content section, an index and a search facility.

An A5 size printed colour manual of 46 pages covers all of the necessary features, tools and functions. The three-page index at the back is very broad in scope and will assist users in locating the particular topic or feature that they require.

Version 1.5 Update

This most recent version of ClozePro has many new features. These are included in the latest release. Owners of previous versions can simply visit the download section of the Cricksoft web site to obtain free ClozePro updates. The web address is http://www.cricksoft.com/uk/downloads/index.htm

These options are now available:

• Students can start sessions with various activities wit their work automatically saved for future sessions
• Improved accessibility, including better highlighting of gaps and new switch access features
• Educators can view reports from previous sessions and compare different students’ reports for the same activity
• There is now secure password protection for the Edit mode and Reports Section
• Full keyboard access so that students can complete all activities with or without using a grid

There are a number of new features as well to ensure that ClozePro remains one of your favourite literacy programs!

Note: There is a PDF document explaining all the new features, and detailed information in ClozePro‘s on-screen help. It is part of the download.

System Requirements

The system requirements for MS Windows® is at least a Pentium II 200 (or greater), with a minimum of 32MB RAM, 50MB Hard disk space and MS Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP operating system. For users running MS Windows 2000 or XP, it would be advisable to have a faster processor (Pentium III or IV with at least 256MB RAM).

On a Mac OS X computer, ClozePro for Mac requires at least a minimum of 32MB free RAM with 75MB hard disk space free for installation of all program files and example activities.