I had my first experience with my new copy of Boardmaker 6.0 today and it was fantastic. I loaded it onto the computer before school and ran out of time. Then in the middle of the day I had a student request to write a (love) letter to another student. I decided to try the new "symbolate" feature of the software, in spite of the fact that I had no idea how it worked.
Symbolate allows you to type and have picture symbols appear as you go, like a basic version of Writing With Symbols. Without looking anything up I was able to guess which button turned the feature on and take dictation from my student (he points to symbols - his AAC device is in the shop). I think it is rather remarkable that having only heard of this feature off hand months ago I was able to intuit how to make it work. Way to go Mayer-Johnson!
Some of the other features I haven't tried out yet are shuffle (like to mix up those symbols to make Bingo boards), free form button shapes, drag and drop buttons (which lets you drag pictures from other places like Google images into the buttons), align and center and package and share.
It is pretty cool, huh? I really am looking forward to next week's release of version six for OSX!
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