Saturday, January 30, 2010

A fun educational technology tool!

One technology tool that has been a huge success is inspiration. I’ve always admired it and I enjoy using it for my own individual needs. Students love to work with inspiration and can construct some great work through inspiration software. Inspiration is an effective visual learning tool that can help students advance in many ways. Inspiration is a great foundation of learning, and can benefit many.

Students can develop graphic organizers and create webs maps, diagrams and webs, which entails to higher-order thinking. They can use these to help organize and group their work for a better understanding of the topic. Its also a great tool for collecting and organizing data, which can often be a hard task for some students.

At first teachers may need to direct students and show them how the software works. After a mini tutorial/lesson, students love to work on their own and explore. This is beneficial for the students and the teacher. Students learn to become independent as well as learn the avenues of finding information, as for teachers it may free up some time to help others.

Students can use inspiration to learn how to organize certain projects and thoughts for understanding, remembering, or writing about any type of material. Inspiration is a great tool mainly because, not all students learn the same. Inspiration is an excellent way to break up the uniformity in the everyday curriculum that students encounter. Students can bring their own individual way of interests and ideas to their work on inspiration. They can add their own personal touch to their inspiration project, but still adhere to requirements in education.

6 comments:

  1. This sounds really cool. do you have a link for it?

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  2. This software sounds great! Is the software free or do schools have to purchase it? It seems that the ability for them to make personal graphic organizers would be a great help for many students!Plus giving students some freedom of choice always helps keep them engaged.

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  3. I checked out the website www.inspiration.com and the software does look interesting, but I had to see an actual lesson plan before I could visualize how it might work. The lesson plan (http://www.inspiration.com/LessonPlan/PersuadeMe) showed how high schoolers can use the sofware to develop a persuasive essay. First the class brainstorms a topic and these ideas are captured. Then smaller groups pick a topic and explore it in further detail listing facts and figures about the topic. Then they can switch from a 'words in bubbles' view to an outline view to draft the actual essay. This is a very cool way to show the steps involved in developing an argument!

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  4. It looks like really cool software. You do have to purchase it, but the costs don't seem to be prohibitive.

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  5. Heeey guys!!

    Thanks for all the feedback!

    I know if you call the actual inspiration company and ask for free software, they'll be more than happy to give it out!!!
    They also give out hats, mugs and all this other free stuff!

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  6. It's definitely worth checking out! I suggest that everyone tries it, and have fun with it!

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