Chess Club Manager Onscreen Demo
(6 of 7)
Teaching with CCM (Part 1 of 2)
You've seen what a great management and motivational tool Chess Club Manager© can be. Now you'll see how, when you combine CCM with our Chess Workouts© series of interactive chess "books-on-disk", you'll have not only a great chess teaching system, but a state of the art educational technology system as well. And best of all - like everything else CCM does - it's incredibly simple!
The Chess Workouts© have their own Demo; if you haven't seen it yet, be sure you go there next. The Workouts are, quite simply, the easiest, most engaging chess "books" that have ever been created. They're "read" on a computer, where interactivity replaces dense chess notation - making them perhaps the first chess books ever that most kids won't put down!
The individual volumes of the Chess Workouts© Series can be used in three different settings. You may choose to have the Workouts installed on:
1. The computer with Chess Club Manager;
2. Satellite computer(s) at school, so you have more teaching stations;
3. Computers at your student's homes, where they work like "digital chess textbooks".We'll look at what you can do in the first example here, and consider the rest in the next step of the Demo.
When you have the Workouts installed on the computer with CCM, they can be used in the normal fashion, as interactive chess books. In addition, you can use CCM to instantly generate beautiful chess puzzle handouts, with the content coming from the puzzles contained in the Workout books themselves. Just select the puzzles you wish to print in a point and click fashion, click the "Print Puzzles" button, and Presto! - you've got your handouts, complete with an answer key so you're sure you can solve them before your players do!
Here's a sample of some puzzles selected from Chess Workouts Volume 6: More Checkmate Thinking©. These examples come from the chapter on Queen & Knight mates; each one is labeled with the title of it's page in the Workout book, and is numbered by it's position in the handout you've printed. (Handouts come with four puzzles to a page; only a half page is shown here. The answer key prints separately).
Not every page in a given Workout book is suitable for including in a Handout, but whenever they are, you can do so without restriction. Over time, you'll easily build up an entire library of handouts focused on specific topics.
One of the nicest things about turning the Workouts into handouts is that it makes the learning accessible to kids with limited computer access. A lack of hardware need not limit your use of these great teaching tools! But if you are fortunate enough to have computers available in school, or better yet, if your students have computers at home, then Chess Club Manager© and the Workouts combine to become the most powerful chess teaching system ever devised for homes and schools! Go on to the next part of the Demo to see what we mean...
