AQA GCSE science resources for all tiers

Longman science for AQA: GCSE science year 10 student book, teacher's guide and ActiveTeach
Nigel English (ed)
Harlow: Pearson Education 2006 | Pp254 + 268 | £15.95 + £95.00 + £495.00 | ISBN1 405 83327 0 + 1 405 83332 7 + 1 405 84177 X

The student textbook comes with an accompanying ActiveBook CD-ROM. The book covers the material for B1, C1 and P1 modules, each split into two units that match the AQA specification. The content is organised into double-page spreads, which are attractively laid out in full colour and include questions. Each unit comes with assessment exercises and an investigative skills assessment. The book offers very good coverage of the specification.  

The CD-ROM contains an electronic copy of the text, which allows students to use the book on a PC. There is an extensive glossary, which is much longer than in the book. The CD-ROM also includes a digilist of electronic target sheets and other documents, presentations and spreadsheets that give additional data not available in the textbook. 

The teacher's guide consists of a folder and accompanying CD-ROM. The folder has sample lesson plans for each double-page spread from the student textbook as well as answers to the questions from the student book and the worksheets from the copymaster folder. The CD-ROM is an electronic copy of the folder with the sheets in Acrobat and Word formats. 

ActiveTeach is a two-disk CD-ROM resource which accompanies the book and teaching materials. The software is supplied with a site licence that allows you to install it on a network or server as well as onto individual PCs. The package consists of an interactive copy of the textbook, similar to the one that accompanies the student book, but with additional teaching materials. There are teacher's notes accompanying each double-page spread and these tell you what resources are available for that spread. The digilist contains animations and videos as well as the material available for students. The additional material is well presented and much of this would work well with an interactive whiteboard or a projector. 

The student textbook is good and would be a useful purchase for any science department teaching the AQA specification. The teacher's guide folder would be essential for any department that adopted this series of resources, though I am not sure how useful the CD-ROM would be. As a standalone resource the ActiveTeach CD-ROM is good value for money. For departments who have adopted the textbook and have a strong ICT basis, the additional material on the ActiveTeach resource would be worth the extra money.