Once you have logged in you will be taken to the main subject selection page for AQA Science Uncovered Online. You can access all of the main functions of the software from here - the rest of this section goes through each function in detail.
This is the first screen you see when you log in. The detail at top-right confirms your login details and shows the current date. Click the 'my profile' link to amend your password, or the 'logout' link to log out of the system and go back to the login page.
The main navigation of the site is in the left-hand navigation menu. This is the same on each page and provides links to:
The top of the main section of the page has links to daily news updates from New Scientist - clicking any one of these will take you to the story on the newscientist.com website. Note that you will need a newscientist.com subscription to read any linked stories that are marked as premium content (it should be clear from the link which stories are so marked).
Below the New Scientist links, three science subject areas are shown again. As with the list in the left-hand navigation, click a subject link to view the unit screen.
Once you have selected a subject the unit screen will display. This shows you a list of available units and will vary depending on the subscription that your school currently has. You can always upgrade your subscription to include more content - contact Harcourt Customer Services for more information.
Click a link to go on to the lesson summary page for that unit. There may be some links to assets at the unit level (skill sheets, etc.). Clicking these will give you an option to open them directly for viewing or to save them to your computer to look at later.
The left-hand column in the main area of the screen shows you all of the lessons available for this unit, as well as any unit-level assets (such as checklists) available. Click a lesson link to go to the summary for that lesson, or click an asset link to view or download the asset.
The right-hand list shows selected New Scientist news stories that are particularly relevant to this unit. These may not necessarily be the latest news stories, but have been selected by Harcourt as having particular relevance to the subject matter of the current unit. Clicking a news story link will take you to the story on the New Scientist website. Note that you will need to have a subscription to read some of the premium content stories.
There are two columns in the main area of the lesson summary page - the left-hand listing all interactive activities and the right-hand listing planning resources.
The interactive resources are designed to be viewed online through your browser. The majority are Macromedia Flash-based and will run as long as you have the latest version of the Flash plug-in installed. Some of the activities are from Crocodile Clips and require that you have their free player on your machine to view them. There is a link to install this player on any page that links to Crocodile Clips materials - just click the link to run the installation program. If you have trouble installing the player you may need to ask your network technician to do this for you.
The planning resources are all in Word format and can either be viewed online (if your browser supports this) or saved to your local machine and viewed in Word (or any program that can read Word-format files). If you have trouble viewing any of the planning documents, right-click on the link to the file and choose to save it to your machine for viewing offline. If you cannot view the files once you have downloaded them you may need to get your technician to install a suitable viewing program on your machine.
Where assets are available to be used in your own work there is a Media Bank link to view or download these to use in presentations or work of your own. Click the 'View as presentation' link to view the asset on screen directly, or click the 'Save to disk' link to save the asset to your local machine for use in your own work.