Friday, May 25, 2007
Inspiration 8, The Premier Tool to Develop Ideas and Organize Thinking
By Brian K. Duck, Product Review Coordinator
Inspiration is the essential tool students rely on to plan, research and complete projects successfully. With the integrated Diagram and Outline Views, they create graphic organizers and expand topics into writing. This powerful combination encourages learning in multiple modes. As a result, students gain and retain a better understanding of concepts and demonstrate knowledge, improving their performance across the curriculum.
This sets the tone this wonderful product now known for its focus on education. Educators need great tools, so Im all for that! But, dont sell this product short: its a great diagramming tool, better than Visio in most cases.
Many Uses
Educators use Inspiration to customize instruction, achieve standards, assess student projects and energize learning. An expanded selection of 120+ cross-curricular templates in language arts, social studies, science, planning and thinking makes starting assignments quick and easy.
Others may use Inspiration to replace WordArt, PowerPoint and Visio diagrams with a minimal effort. Inspiration is quick, functional and useful. One thing I’ll miss is the ability to copy an Inspiration diagram from version 7.6 to Freehand, perform an ‘ungroup,’ and be able to manipulate the individual drawing elements: hopefully, we’ll see this functionality back in version 8.1
Visualize ideas, concepts and relationships
In Diagram View, students create graphic organizers — a core element of visual learning — to analyze, compare and evaluate information. They quickly brainstorm new ideas with the RapidFire tool, search the symbol collection to find images to represent any concept, and insert and play multimedia files. To show relationships between ideas, students link symbols and add words to further clarify meaning.
Improve writing proficiency
As they start the writing process, students use visually integrated notes to expand topics and switch to Outline View to further develop their ideas. The integrated Word Guide helps students choose words with more precision, and a contextual spell checker automatically identifies misspelled words. To finalize projects, students can transfer to their favorite word processor or transform their work into a web site with the Site Skeleton export tool.
Plan and organize projects
Inspiration helps students organize information, develop thinking skills and demonstrate knowledge. Drag-and-drop actions and hyperlinks make it easy to gather research and connect to files and web resources. As students develop their projects, they use AutoArrange to automatically format their diagrams.
Student Uses
Students develop essential learning strategies as they create graphic organizers to visually represent concepts and relationships.
Inspiration’s integrated diagramming and outlining views and complementary learning capabilities work together to make Inspiration the essential tool to help students visualize, think, organize and learn.
General Features
Visually represent ideas
Switch to Diagram Toolbar Button Inspiration’s Diagram View makes it easy to express ideas, discover relationships and develop new thoughts and perspectives.
In the Diagram View you can:
- Brainstorm ideas quickly with the RapidFire® tool. Capture thoughts with or without automatic links to symbols.
- Represent thoughts and information with pictures, images, words and multimedia-such as QuickTime® movies and MP3 files. Find just the right image from Inspiration’s library of 1,000+ searchable symbols or insert a graphic from Inspiration’s online symbol collection, containing more than 1 million illustrations and photographs.
- Show relationships among ideas with the Link tool. Explain relationships by adding text directly on the links.
- Explore ideas, record research and begin writing with visually integrated notes. New drag-and-drop capabilities make it easy to quickly gather research.
- Differentiate among ideas and groups with colors, shapes, patterns and fonts.
- Manage notes, audio and subtopic information with Quick Controls.
- Organize ideas effortlessly using the Arrange tool or use AutoArrange to automatically format diagrams as you work.
- Plan projects and track ideas using the Checklist feature.
Diagram to outline with one click
Switch to Outline View Toolbar Button
With a simple mouse click, students can transform a diagram into a hierarchical outline.
In Outline View, you can:
- Organize ideas and arrange thoughts by dragging subtopics. Diagram View updates automatically.
- Add new topics to further develop ideas.
- Manage notes, audio and subtopic information with Quick Controls.
- Develop topics into written reports using notes text. Students can add up to 15 pages of notes text for each topic.
- Plan projects and track ideas using the Checklist feature.
Develop ideas and organize writing easily with intuitive toolbars
Diagram Toolbar
Outline Toolbar
Formatting Toolbar Formatting Toolbar
Major Inspiration functions are at students’ fingertips with our smart toolbars. No need to memorize keyboard shortcuts or search through menu items to find features — just click on the toolbar and keep working! Plus, the fully indexed and searchable help system provides answers to Inspiration-related questions.
Jumpstart projects with templates
Start assignments quickly with inspiring templates that offer frameworks for gathering information and organizing ideas in language arts, science, social studies, thinking skills and planning topics. 65 templates - A wealth of ideas from across the curriculum inspires students and teachers to plan, organize and create. More than 60 additional templates are available through Inspiration Web Resources.
Template Wizard - Create customized visual learning activities! The Template Wizard gives teachers step-by-step help for designing templates to support any curriculum area. Custom libraries may also be created and saved with templates for sharing with other computers. Teachers can also limit the symbol library for targeted study. Flexible template access - Use and share templates with ease! Templates can be stored and launched from any location, making them readily available for students and teachers.
Integrate video and sound
Use multimedia to create more engaging and informed projects. Students insert and play video and sound, such as QuickTime® movies and MP3 files, right in Inspiration. Students can also record their own audio and attach it to a symbol or topic.
Write with clarity and accuracy
Students write with clarity and build vocabulary using the Word Guide, an innovative dictionary and thesaurus. Information—including parts of speech, definitions and synonyms—is displayed in a familiar way to help students quickly find and choose words with precision.
Connect directly to research and information sources
Enrich Inspiration diagrams and outlines by adding hyperlinks that connect to other documents, including web sites, Inspiration documents and files created in other programs. This provides students with a simple way to gather research and keep their work and materials together.
Turn Inspiration documents into robust final projects
Export Inspiration diagrams and outlines to continue working on projects in word processing documents, PowerPoint slides and graphics files.
Use the Site Skeleton® export to seamlessly convert outlines and diagrams to HTML and incorporate the diagram’s symbols, video and sound into web pages. Each symbol becomes a separate web page, complete with appropriate hyperlinks. Inspiration even creates a site map.
Get more visual learning power with Inspiration Web Resources
Use Inspiration with an Internet connection to seamlessly access these additional complimentary resources:
More than 1 million symbols
Students better demonstrate their understanding and communicate their ideas by including symbols in their projects. An online Inspiration symbol collection, containing more than 1 million searchable illustrations and photographs, offers safe image choices for any topic.
50+ Curriculum Packets
Curriculum Packets help teachers effectively integrate visual learning techniques as they address multiple learning styles. Each comprehensive online Curriculum Packet provides an integrated unit plan with multiple templates and exemplars. Each of the 50+ Curriculum Packets offers standards-aligned supplemental instructional units for high-school level language arts, social studies or science.
On-demand training videos
Learn how to use Inspiration and complete projects efficiently with on-demand training videos. These online videos cover Inspiration’s most commonly used features.
Additional ease-of-use
Inspiration Starter screen
Quickly begin projects or access training and teaching resources from the Inspiration Starter screen.
AutoArrange
Organize ideas effortlessly with AutoArrange. Students more efficiently add content and develop their projects, using AutoArrange to automatically format their diagrams as they work.
Brainstorming
Capture ideas quickly with the enhanced RapidFire® tool. Students choose to add ideas that link automatically to a symbol or to add unconnected ideas that they can later associate and link.
Custom symbol libraries
Help students focus on learning by providing symbols specific to their assignments. Using Inspiration’s Template Wizard, custom symbol libraries can be saved and shared with template files or teachers can limit student access to symbol libraries.
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Posted by
Brian Duck on 05/25 at 12:59 PM
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