Clicker 6 is the latest version of John Crick's multi-award winning software, and is the most amazing and brilliant tool ever placed in the hands of language teachers. Very simply, you put any combination of words and variations you wish to teach onto a grid, and then click on the words to form sentences. As you don't have to write each word by hand, all of your or the child's attention can be focused on choosing the correct words for your purpose, hopefully (with thanks to Eric Morcambe) in the right order. Enter a full stop, and the sentence is read back to you. Add pictures, stories, animations and books and you have a versatile multimedia package of unrivalled scope, which is invaluable for teaching virtually anything and which, for my purposes at least, knocks the big standard whiteboard programs into a cocked hat.
For languages teachers, though, the big feature is the ability to have children compose, edit and extend sentences, which are then read back to them, and which they practise saying. The read back uses Acapalo voices, which have been improved so that they are now disarmingly realistic in French and Spanish, and very good in English, so that the benefits of near-native - the French and Spanish are so close to natural speech that this is an understatement - pronunciation, with the flexibility of saying what you want to, are now within the reach of every languages teacher.
When I showed Clicker to the late Michel Thomas, who made a fortune out of teaching languages to adults, his response was immediate and unqualified - "This is good. This is very good. You are a great teacher." All I had done, though, was use John Crick's software in a way that matched Thomas's approach to spoken language, with similar benefits. The great teacher here is John Crick, and it is time for the languages community to make full use of his work.