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"Your examples showed how we can maximize student participation in every class activity, and thus have them take ownership of their own learning." Margartia Curtis |
You Are Here: Home > Inspiration Tutorials, Resources, and Examples Inspiration Tutorials, Resources, and Examples Inspiration is terrific software. Both teachers and students can use it creatively and efficiently to organize ideas, illustrate themes, explore relationships between all sorts of objects both imaginary and tangible - and many other things, as well. Students can learn the basics quickly, then take time to poke around in the menus and really take it out for a ride, step on the gas. The ensuing journey might be a little bit bumpy, but it will also be thrilling: who doesn't enjoy creating gorgeous graphics the help illuminate sharp ideas? I have found that the first thing a teacher has to do when introducing students to Inspiration is to tell them what it is not: This isn't Powerpoint, students. It does not move, shake (with some exceptions), make noise (with some exceptions) or flip through a bunch of slides. Inspiration, I tell them, is static, not dynamic; it is a flat workspace that is waiting there to help you organize, create, and illustrate. Most students know Powerpoint by the time you're going to give them Inspiration, so they might initially be disappointed when they learn that the software does not easily lend itself to screeching brakes or breaking glass sound effects, or some of the other attributes that sometimes lead to what is known as "PowerPointlessness." It is the teacher's job, then, to show students how powerful, flexible, and persuasive this software can be.
It goes without saying that the teacher should let the students start simple, with creating Inspiration documents about themselves: they can draw a graphic representation of their immediate family, with themselves at the middle, of course. Then you can ask them to extend that to their wider family of aunts and cousins, and perhaps their friends. They will enjoy showing the multiple interrelationships among various people and relatives, and perhaps see, as the graphic becomes a little bit more complex, some links that were not so apparent before this exercise. Another good beginning activity is "My Vacation," showing various people, places, choices, and actions all in one document. The teacher can then begin to challenge the student some more, showing them some nice tools: how to use Rapidfire; exploring the uses of the shapes in the menu at the bottom of the page; digging into some of the useful and fun items on the Symbol Palette; helping them do some formatting; explaining that the software is excellent for presenting a time line. Research - and showing the results of that research - can be next. Ask the students to show President Bush's cabinet - and make sure not to answer the student who immediately asks where to find the names. They'll figure it out quickly by clicking on the blue E down on the toolbar. At that point you can show that Inspiration is web-friendly, and tell them to make sure to put some live links in the document so that others can view their sources. After that can follow an assignment involving research and reporting on time, events, and people - perhaps a representation of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The teacher will be surprised and pleased at how quickly the students pick up first the basics and then the more advanced tools in Inspiration. At some point you will state what the students already know: that what matters is content, not toys. The latter can be fun, and there are plenty of them in Inspiration, but they should be used to illustrate ideas, not distract from them. Finally, bring the students into the template menu and show them that the friendly software-makers have given them some gorgeous structures already fully realized. Encourage them to poke around among those templates; this will give you a chance to explain what a Venn diagram actually is, and why it is useful to show just certain relationships. So this, too, is a good teachable moment. Inspiration presents many of these in the learning and the application, and that's what makes it such good software for teaching and learning. --Dr. Arnold Pulda Inspiration Tutorials and Resources Internet4classrooms: Inspiration 50 Uses for Inspiration and Kidspiration Inspiration in the Classroom: Created by Teachers Make a Timeline with Inspiration |
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