PLT Workshop 1: Inspiration

28/07/2010

Inspiration (http://www.inspiration.com/)

In our first Learning Technologies workshop, we were introduced to Inspiration, a software that is the self-proclaimed ‘ultimate thinking and learning tool’. Quite the bold statement, but it has some truth to it.

I am a big believer in brainstorming and mind mapping, and did a lot of this during the ‘tuning in’ phase of my lessons while on teaching rounds. It’s an excellent way to get students thinking about the topic at hand, and also helped me to identify their prior knowledge. Although these exercises are somewhat interactive for students, I sometimes found them a bit monotonous… For example, Lesson 1: ‘Ok class, we’re starting our Integrated unit on Oceans. Let’s brainstorm!’; Lesson 2: ‘Ok 3/4s, we’re going to be talking about Australian animals today. Let’s make a mind map!’; Lesson 3… well, you get the point!

 What Inspiration provides is a more visually appealing way to organise information. You can enter something as your central ‘Topic’, and then use arrows (‘links’) and clipart to branch out from this topic and create subtopics. What I like about this is how neat and organised it looks, especially in comparison to some of the in-class brainstorms I’ve made in the past…

Christine’s Classroom: Inspiration

I would definitely use this program in my classroom, but I would model it for the students first. It’s a great way to incorporate ICT into the ‘tuning in’ phase, and the wide-range of clip art would likely get student’s attention. After modeling the program a few times, I would allow students to experiment with using Inspiration during ICT sessions, and would hold small focus groups to make sure students understand how to use it efficiently.

Drawbacks:

- Although this software is quite user-friendly, I did find it difficult to control the appearance of the arrows or ‘links’ between topics and sub-topics. After a bit of frustration, I realized that the arrow linking the ideas needs to point to a specific part of the clip-art. This would be a bit of a time-waster for students, so I would show them specifically how to do this.

- I think students would go off on a tangent when selecting clip-art that is relevant to their brainstorm or mind-map. I would encourage them to first type in the text for the subtopics, and then choose visuals that are appropriate.

- I’m not really sure when you would choose to use the mind map template versus the brainstorming one… Any suggestions?

*Quick Tips:  

During the workshop, we were shown how to use the ‘print screen’ function, which I was familiar with beforehand. It’s a bit tedious on a PC (print screen - open Paint - Paste - Crop - Cut & paste into new paint document) and is much easier to do on my Mac (shift + F4 + spacebar gives you a ‘snapshot’ image of the area you’ve selected). It was interesting to hear how many people didn’t know about this function on their computers – I don’t know what I would do without it!