SUNBURST TECHNOLOGY ENHANCES QUICKMUND.NET ONLINE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT CONTENT FOR UPPER GRADES

Extensive new math, biology, chemistry, science, writing, literature and geography resources add to QuickMind.net's value without changing its price

ORLANDO, March 22, 2006 - At the annual Florida Educational Technology Conference today leading educational publisher Sunburst Technology announced exciting new content for middle and high school students in its award-winning QuickMind.net online learning environment for grades K to 12. The addition of extensive new content significantly strengthens its offerings for upper grades: Math Pathways, a complete multimedia math curriculum for grades 6 to 12; Geography Challenge, a comprehensive K to 12 geography activity covering all countries and continents; and online courses for biology, chemistry and writing. Math Pathways is live now, and Geography Challenge and the online courses are expected to go live in the next month. All of this new content will be aligned to every state's standards within QuickMind.net through a brand new standards engine, with up-to-date standards for 50 states and a higher level of alignment than any competitor, over the summer.

The award-winning QuickMind.net is a powerful intervention tool that offers educators in grades K to 12 a wealth of curriculum content from Sunburst's library of classic titles, as well as over 20,000 organized and easy to use online resources to enrich their classes. These include language arts, math, science and social studies curricula. QuickMind.net provides educators and students in grades K-12 with extensive lesson-planning, homework and assessment resources at school, home or anywhere that they have an Internet connection.

Math Pathways	Geography Challenge	XSIQ

"Our latest enhancements add an amazing amount of content, especially for middle and high school grades, to QuickMind.net's already excellent collection of over 20,000 classroom resources," said David Wolff, Sunburst Technology Senior Vice President. "And this was just our latest round of updates. We add new content to QuickMind.net every month as a free update for our QuickMind.net customers, which makes the product very dynamic. With Math Pathways alone, we just added an entire math curriculum. The value of QuickMind.net is unmatched."

Math Pathways is a complete mathematics instructional solution for grades 6 to 12, that provides rich media and interactive activities to engage and motivate students to master math concepts. Math Pathways is filled with modern video lessons, animations, interactive exercises, and self-assessments. Developed specifically for QuickMind.net, the comprehensive program, equivalent to six CD-ROM network versions worth of content, includes more than 1,000 lessons.

The mathematics content is organized into six categories: Grades 6-8, Algebra 1, Algebra 2, Plane Geometry, Solid Geometry, and Trigonometry. Each of these categories covers over 100 topics and 400 subject pages. The curriculum, which can be used as core instruction or as supplemental help, correlates to major textbooks. Each subject contains in depth topics within each subject. Each topic features a lesson using powerful video, interactive examples, practice examples, and self-assessments to teach and reinforce concepts. The core development approach was used to connect concepts to real world examples as much as possible. The content can support all basal textbooks used at schools.

Students obtain a thorough understanding of the material by viewing an interactive demonstration first to prepare them for practice exercises. Each individual lesson has practice exercises that help reinforce concepts. Every lesson features self-assessments to ensure skill mastery. A dictionary is always available to help students master basic concepts and terminology.

Geography Challenge, another new addition to QuickMind.net that enhances its social studies content, is a comprehensive geography educational game for students in grades K to 12, covering all countries and all continents in the world. Geography Challenge includes a wide range of world content to build students' geographic literacy. For each geographic region, such as Europe, there are 8 progressive levels of activities. Lower levels are appropriate for elementary school students, while upper levels are challenging for middle and high school students.

In the first level, students can click on any country to receive some introductory information and facts about it through a pop-up window. In the second level, students click and drag on countries to put them in the right space on a jigsaw puzzle map. In level 4, students are asked to locate a country on the map. In level 8, the most challenging activity, students are asked to spell the capitals of countries. If the name is misspelled several times, the student is prompted with the correct spelling. The system tracks the number of right and wrong answers for students to see on the main menu bar. A chain link icon at the top of the screen enables students to receive a list of resource web links that they can visit to expand their knowledge about each geographic location. Upon completion of an activity, students are congratulated and rewarded with a certificate, which they can view and print.

Through a licensing agreement between Sunburst and educational publisher XSIQ, content from XSIQ's interact™ online courses are coming soon to QuickMind.net. XSIQ's courses for middle and high school students are highly interactive online tutorials for middle and high school subjects that include stimulating animations, 3-D models, videos, worked examples and practice questions, interactive review activities and simulations. The courses provide an engaging learning experience and bring subject matter to life for students in a way that textbooks alone can't. Courses include Chemistry, Biology, Writing, and Literature and offer over 1,000 pages of highly engaging content that includes simulations, interactive examples, and multimedia.

The courses can be used either for core instruction, similar to any printed textbook, or for supplemental help. The lessons are designed for easy navigation so a student can log in from home and use the program for self-study. Practice exercises and simulations help them successfully grasp complex concepts. Teachers can also incorporate the courses into classroom time by projecting the lessons on a screen or a whiteboard and using the rich interactive elements and video content to help convey complex concepts to the class.

Online courses for middle school content areas include Science, Writing and Grammar and Shakespeare. In the Science course, middle school science comes alive with this introductory, informative look at science. Students learn about: the characteristics and classification of living things, cells, food and digestion, atoms and molecules, kinetic theory, the periodic table and acids and bases. Writing and Grammar provides information on punctuation, grammar, writing styles and story writing in compelling interactive modules. Students explore writing styles through a range of multimedia activities, which provide ideas, story starters and revision exercises. Shakespeare uses extracts from plays such as "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "Romeo and Juliet," "Macbeth" and "The Tempest," to explore the language and literary devices of Shakespeare.

Online course for high school content areas include Physics, Chemistry, English and Biology. The Physics course is designed to help students understand the application of physics in real life. Chemistry explores quality control and the large-scale production of chemicals. It also covers the relationship between the production and use of energy in living and nonliving things, the Periodic Table and food chemistry. English covers the development of critical responses to both literary and non-literary texts. Students learn the art of text analysis, techniques for analyzing and researching issues, skills for effective oral presentations along with methods to engage critically and confidently with audiences. Biology is a comprehensive resource that examines cellular structures and processes.

Sunburst's content enhancements to QuickMind.net are ongoing. QuickMind.net provides 24-hour access to standards-based curriculum, interactive homework assignments, project templates, tools, lesson plans, reference materials and online professional development via a password-protected Web site. It is one of a select assortment of intervention solutions available through Sunburst Technology's new "Sunburst Learning Solutions" educational consulting program, dedicated to providing schools with student achievement solutions for differentiated instruction.

Pricing & Availability QuickMind.net is available as annual subscription sold exclusively through Educational Resources and the Sunburst Learning Solutions program. The subscription allows teachers, students, parents, and administrators unlimited access to QuickMind.net anytime, anywhere. Pricing for QuickMind.net is customized for schools and districts. The starting price for an annual building subscription with unlimited users is $7,000. Special district is also available. For a free demo of the product or free on-site consultation, educators can visit http://www.QuickMind.net or call 888-665-8307 for more information.

Company Background Sunburst Technology publishes award-winning instructional software and the QuickMind.net online learning environment for the K-12 school market. Proprietary series in the Sunburst lineup include HyperStudio®, Key Skills, Tenth Planet, and Little Planet. Top selling titles include HyperStudio, Type to Learn, Key Skills Series, Hot Dog Stand: The Works, Easy Book Deluxe and A to Zap! The publisher, a company of Thayer Capital Partners, is headquartered in Elgin, IL, with its development center in Valhalla, NY.

# # # #