Technology Integration
Inspiration / Kidspiration
What is it?
Inspiration:
This program is geared towards students, grades 6-12. Students create graphic organizers, develop ideas and expand topics into writing and integrate them in either the Diagram or Outline Views. As a result, students gain and retain a better understanding of concepts and demonstrate knowledge, improving their performance across the curriculum.
In the Diagram View, students easily create and use concept maps, webs and other graphic organizers. The result is clearer thinking, more-creative projects, better-organized writing and improved student performance.
In the Diagram View, the student can:
- Capture ideas as quickly as you think with the RapidFire® tool.
- Add as little or as much text as you want — symbols grow automatically to record your thoughts.
- Illustrate ideas and convey meanings by inserting symbols from the web or other applications using the insert graphic, drag & drop, or copy & paste functions.
- Show relationships between ideas with the Link tool.
- Explain relationships between ideas by adding text directly on the links.
- Rearrange symbols by dragging without breaking links.
- Differentiate among ideas with colors, shapes, patterns, shadows, fonts and styles.
- Bring writing power with visually integrated notes.
- Explore multiple main ideas simultaneously.
Additionally, the student can easily transform an Inspiration diagram into a traditional hierarchical outline. In the powerful Outline View, students can quickly prioritize and rearrange ideas, helping them create clear, concise essays, reports and more. Inspiration also allows students to move their work to word processing applications, such as Microsoft Word or AppleWorks. Finally, Inspiration contains over 1,300 colorful, high-resolution symbols, including several hundred photographic quality images and animated symbols. If they want to customize their work, they can recolorize an existing symbol or import images from other applications and the Internet.
Source: http://www.enablemart.com/productdetail.aspx?store=10&pid=91&dept=22
Kidspiration:
This program is geared toward elementary school students, grades K-5. Essentially, this program is geared for and supports the emerging readers and writers by providing more opportunities for students to express themselves visually and to recognize the connection between words and their meanings. Kidspiration 2.1 also includes 75 ready-made activities, a new Venn diagram option, one-click transfer to word processors and expanded teacher options.
The Symbol Maker drawing tool allows students to express their creativity and individuality by drawing and painting their own symbols. With one click, students integrate their personalized symbols into graphic organizers, enhancing the ability to communicate visually. Any symbol can become a shape that designates a group. For example, students might place items for "school" into a backpack, rather than a plain circle or box. In this way, the activity becomes more engaging and meaningful. Kidspiration 2.1 also features a Venn diagram SuperGrouper shape. This time-honored visual format gives students a way to more precisely show similarities and differences.
In Writing View, pictures are now displayed next to corresponding words. This reinforces the relationship between known language and a meaningful image. As always, students can add speech support by choosing to use the Listen tool. Additionally, in Writing View, the Publish tool launches Microsoft® Word or AppleWorks® and transfers student work from Kidspiration. Educators can modify settings to include a picture of the diagram.
Source: http://www.enablemart.com/productdetail.aspx?store=10&pid=60&dept=22
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