Comments on Inspiration Concept-Mapping Software

My English teachers love it for analyzing literature, the History teachers use it for "cause and effect" diagrams and my Science teachers use it for complex systems analysis.

John Durham

Cannon Upper School

It's great for organizing and brainstorming and helps make student thinking visible so that teachers can redirect thinking if needed. Diagrams that you make can be made poster-size for displays, posting on classroom walls, etc. It is a very versatile tool for everyone except the youngest students (they use Kidspiration).

Leigh Ausband

Richland County School District One

Many of the teachers have their students start a project by using Inspiration for concept mapping. I personally use Inspiration for planning reports, presentations, websites, general flow charts and organization charts.

Derrel Fincher

American School in Japan

We use it for virtually all subjects and all grades from Kindergarten up. If you go to the website http://www.inspiration.com/resources/index.cfm there is a lot of information about graphic organizers and how they help kids learn, organize information and present information. Brainstorming alone is a great use of Inspiration. The new version allows links to websites, other documents, email and is very powerful.

Joyce E. Fitch

LaGrange School District 102

Inspiration is the best way to teach intermediate grade (3-5) students the steps in the research process. The students are able to find information and extract it in note form fairly easily, and they can write age appropriate paragraphs from an outline. However, the step that always confounded them was reorganizing all those notes into a coherent collection from which to create the outline. We tried the standard note cards, which entails lots of shuffling. We tried taking notes on legal pads and cutting apart note facts and sorting them into related piles, and got no success there either.
    Finally, with Inspiration the process became clear. Once students have browsed for good sources and compiled a bibliography of their richest sources, we ask them to create a simple concept web in graphic form consisting of the main topic and important sub-topics. Then the students return to their sources and read for information that pertains to the sub-topic nodes they have defined. As the students find facts they "drop" them into the appropriate sub-topic box by putting them on the note page associated with the sub-topic node. We don't allow verbatim copying of passages; notes must be in abbreviated form and in the student's own words.
    When information sources have been exhausted, the students convert the graphic web into the outline form, and voila! they recognize all the facts under each topic as the notes they've been accumulating. Since the students are fairly comfortable manipulating an outline and they have by now done considerable reading about the subject, they are able to rearrange the sub-topics in the order in which they want to present their topic.
Some more sophisticated students are able to create sub-sub-topics or to group facts in the sub-topic note page to make the writing easier. Here is also the place to inspect each sub-topic for completeness. If one area is thin, there is time for further research.
    When the outline is satisfactory to the student, then writing or other knowledge product production can proceed without confusion.
    I might add that we don't bother with graphics and special effects here.
Those things are so often thieves of time and do little to help students develop solid thinking skills.

P. Miller