Inspiration

Graphic organizers hold a crucial place in education and are all too often overlooked as "simple" tools. However, these useful tools allow teachers a great amount of flexibility in what and how we teach. I recently was able to reacquaint myself with Inspiration, via a 30 day trial.
The overall program appeared simple to use with templates and tutorials to get the novice user started. I skipped those and immediately adapted an old lesson to this new software and was blown away with the possibilities.

An Inspiration Organizer created and exported to html

If available, Inspiration allows us to prepare an organizer to help students make sense of learning, or to create one on the fly or with student involvement. It would also be a useful tool for students to create their own organizer, based on how they best remember information and the connections between different aspects. The ability to create hotlinks, add pictures, create a text only outline, or to even upload it for remote viewing makes Inspiration a luxury more schools and educators should indulge.

On a side note:
In using it, I discovered an all too common problem in technology, compatibility. In my efforts to export the organizer to html and upload it to a website, I was stonewalled by a problem beyond my knowledge. Thankfully the tech support people at Inspiration knew a work-around and it was simple to solve. It appears that Inspiration works wonderfully, if you use a Mac. My PC had some difficulties.

As teachers, using the latest, greatest technology can be fun, but also frustrating if the program does not work correctly or at all. Luckily, I haven't seen this for awhile:

Regardless, teachers need to verify, usually through trial and error, that programs work as intended. After all much of mine, and perhaps yours as well, technology is one internet outtage away from being nearly useless.

Easter Egg: With the current debate over healthcare, and the benefits to organization, perhaps our government should find Inspiration useful...or maybe they already use it.

Google really is taking over everything...

Google has invaded my PC and my classroom...

I have abandoned browsers like IE, Firefox, Opera and now use Chrome.
Google is the new vernacular for "to inquire or ask".
Now Google Earth has invaded my classroom.

Not only does Earth allow you to get directions and satellite photos, it allows my students to visit places around the world without the annoyance of airlines.
In my unit on Europe in Geography, students created a fantasy vacation with no limitations except to stay in the continent and the allotted 10 day travel time. What they found and showed blew us all away.
I used Earth to give mini-tours of places using a common theme like castles or cathedrals to help students think of sites to see. They not only used Earth for basics like distance, direction, and travel time, but they also used it to show pictures of places they were "visiting" and often discovered amazing off the beaten path sites that a regular textbook or Google-ing would have found. Then to top it off, several used Earth's tour option to share their learning with the class via a projector and Smartboard.
The user submitted and maintained content gave my students ample resources to draw from, including links to hotel websites and reviews of resturaunts to the best best time to visit Plaza de St. Pietro in Rome.
As a caveat, however, I had a few parents complain that the program had created an internet hog in their student and they asked about how to troubleshoot the problem.