Inspiration 8 IE - Use and Ideas

Inspiration 8 IE - a great visual mapping tool that does both mind maps and concept maps. It's really easy to use because of the drag and drop interface. There are enough pictures supplied with the program so that meaningful work can be done without too much program knowledge - excellent for play! When the images get boring it's a very simple copy/paste to get new ones from the internet.

There's a 30-day trial on the Inspiration website so towards the end of term so I might download it and watch the supplied "Learn to use" training videos for ideas to use with a class.

Concept MapsInspiration looks like a great tool for things like family trees and food webs, and could be used as an activity in a literacy program to discuss plot, character and setting. The picture to the left is a concept map.

Greg outlined a great task of giving kids a shopping list, and getting them to group items according to where they are in the supermarket. Even a basic sorting activity could be made more interesting using this software. In a literacy activity you could get the students to sort characters into families, or age groups. 

Mind Maps

These are a similar sort of arrangement actually but with different graphics. I think the main difference is that on a concept map you can interlink, however on the Mind Map example at the right you couldn't link an orange item with a green one.

With a mind map you could use colours consistently, eg green for environmental concerns and whatever other colours the children want to assign. In this way it could easily provide a visual basis for thinking about new topics.The mind map feature would be useful for creating a dichotomous key in Level 4 - even making a classroom "Guess Who" game. I actually think it would be a great tool for creating "Choose Your Own Adventure books" - the students could list the flow of events, create a page for each one and mix up the order in the book.

You could make probability diagrams easily with a mind map. It could also be a way of creating fixtures for sporting tournaments like tennis. It's a pity the Australian Open is in the school holidays because that would be a great relevant topic - unfortunately by the time the children come back to school everyone's over the tennis! For a French LOTE class you could do this during the French Open and even integrate it with tennis skills in PE! All from one mind map.

Classroom Practicalities

One important note from today was not to teach children all the features of software at once - give them a 10-minute overview and then set them free to play. I know I learned far more by playing than I would have by watching someone click around a screen. Everyone's brain is wired differently and different features spark interest at different times. If those sparks aren't kindled then ICT could become an unwelcome chore for children.

The children would be able to come up with tons of uses for this software that I haven't thought of. I'm looking forward to finding out how kids think by watching what they do with the pictures and what connections they make.