Post - The Sixth

Using Inspiration

I have decided during this post to evaluate the programme Inspiration and discuss its advantages for children in the classroom environment.

Inspiration is a piece of software that allows people to organise their ideas and thoughts in various diagrams. These include concept maps, idea maps, webs and storyboards. The programme also allows users to organise their ideas with pictures and symbols. The programme is also extremely straight forward to use which enables pupils to create effective diagrams in a minimal amount of time.

The programme is also useful in that it allows the diagrams to be exported and saved in various formats. This allows diagrams to be incorporated into other programmes such as word, power-point and even dropped into a web page, as I have done above. This would therefore seem to be an advantage of the programme above pen and paper as the diagrams are easily transferable.

For children this software has various uses. I would argue that children love using the computer so will put a lot of time and effort into making the concept webs so they would be better than if they did their maps on paper because of the novelty. The concept maps are also far more easy to edit if they are on the computer and editing is an important skill for children to master as they need to be able to realise that making mistakes is OK. The process is also extremely visual and this can help meet important learning needs.

Although this idea can be very very useful for children to map out their ideas in an effective, visual way. Also this programme may be faster for children to map down ideas, for me, I would rather use a pen and paper for my planning. I would argue that for some people then the software will never be as effective as a pen and paper, but I think children will really benefit from using this programme.