It's always dicey buying an educational CD-ROM... nobody wants to pay $100 or so, and find out you have a very boring reference item that you will likely be unable to convince students to use. Thankfully, Cyber-Ed products don't fall into this category!

The Cyber-Ed CDs tested by ScienceMan are winners on several fronts. Just like meeting people, first impressions are a big concern. Cyber-Ed delivers on this front with a slick and intuitive interface that stays consistent across all their CDs.

The CD's are extremely well organized, allowing the user to jump to the main menu at any time and choose from presentation mode, interactive lessons or testing modules. If you start in on the interactive lessons and decide to quit, the program gives you the option of remembering your position so you don't have to go through tests you have already completed if you don't want to. Very well done.

Sound controls and help are included, and you also get bonus features, such as an included periodic table reference in the "Introduction to Chemistry" CD, just to point out one!

The narration in the presentation mode is absolutely crystal clear. Some of the photography is really impressive as well;

So there are no worries in regard to presentation, organization and sound. But what about content? ScienceMan has been up late for several nights working through a bunch of the CDs, including; Atomic Structure, Introduction to Chemistry, Properties of Acids, Bases and Salts, Formulas, Equations and Stoichiometry, Naming Chemical Compounds, two disks on Bonding, Electronic Structure, Periodic Table and Trends, Arthropods, Flowering Plants, Biomes and Non-Flowering Plants. I'm pleased to report that all the CDs cover their respective topics thoroughly and accurately. With all the CDs, you can choose to automatically or manually work your way through a main narrated presentation of about 40-50 frames. You'd think that would be too short, but each frame incudes a lot of content, so the presentations really do the job.

Not only is there a lot of content in each frame, but there are animations and movies as well. In the frame above, electrons swirl in their "cloud" orbits, lewis dot structures are highlighted in unison with the narration, and diagrams are added to emphasize particular points.

The interactive tests included with each CD are a pleasure to use. Every interactive module comes with clear instructions on what to do. Many educational CD's will claim "interactivity" by having a few disappointing "fill in the blank" frames. The people at Cyber-Ed have obviously gone through the trouble of making varied and interesting tasks for students to complete.

There are even more advantages to these CDs. Each one includes excellent test modules that will assess your understanding of the topic. You can tailor the test difficulty somewhat, by changing the amount of response time per question. If this wasn't enough, a wonderful text supplement will accompany your purchase. This supplement can be used a "tour guide" for the presentation on the CD, but can also be used to provide a written version of the test material as well.

I can see these CDs being of use in the classroom in several different ways. On top of regular instruction, I can see the teacher using them for lecture purposes. Where they will really shine is in testing and for tutorials. It would be great, for example, to give the flowering plants CD to a student who is having trouble with flower parts or identification of moncots and dicots;

What I really like about this company is that they aren't pushing 4 year old CDs - they work to update their offerings and are constantly coming out with new material.

ScienceMan was lucky to obtain some of these new releases! I was completely bowled over by the outstanding quality - little improvements are evident in just about every category, graphics, sound, content, interface... all are spectacular and should be extremely useable in the classroom. Here are a few sneak peeks from the "Annelids" CD;

My new favourite has to be the new release - "DNA - The Molecule of Life". I must say, I am running out of superlatives to describe Cyber-Ed CD's - they are extremely impressive. In this latest DNA CD, the quality of the images are (like the other CDs) excellent;

I was also impressed with the included large exams, the ability to "save your spot", and you can navigate very easily. The animations are also spectacular - the following is a short QuickTime clip from the protein synthesis section - unfortunately, compression for the web does not do this justice, the animations on the CD are crystal clear and quite striking;

If you are looking for excellent science tutorial/instructional CD-ROMs, you definitely should have the Cyber-Ed products on your list!

In summary, I think you would be happy with your purchase of Cyber-Ed CDs. Can they be improved at all? I really doubt it, but count on the folks at Cyber-Ed to constantly to update their titles, and come out with new ones as well.

So what are you waiting for? Go out and buy some Cyber-ed CDs!