The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

TUAW's going Back to School! We'll be bringing you tips and reviews for students, parents and teachers right up until the bell rings in September. Read on cool software for K-8 classrooms.

Canvastic LLC has announced a new version of the Canvastic graphics, writing, and publishing tool. Canvastic is designed to be used in K-8 classrooms, and is fun and productive for students.

Canvastic 3.5 is designed for use on both PPC and Intel Macs (which is great, as many American schools still use older Macs). The student publishing tool includes drawing, text and presentation tools, plus an Audio Tool for voice recording, insertion of sounds and integration with iTunes. Audio tracks can be played in documents or presentations.

Other new features include:

• Transparency and color tones in graphics and text
• Teachers can enable or disable spell checking, and also keep students from "customizing" the dictionary
  
• New brush shapes
  
• The ability to import digital photographs
• Additional templates, backgrounds, and art

As before, Canvastic presents a customized user interface depending on the grade level of the student. Canvastic 3.5 is a free upgrade for all registered users, and those with free site licenses can upgrade for 50% of the posted educational prices. Pricing ranges from US$39 for one user to US$949 for an unlimited school building license. Schools can do an unlimited pilot of Canvastic for up to 60 days, and many school districts qualify for a free site license for half of their schools.

Click here to download the free trial.