Elementary School, Middle School, and High School Educators are invited to attend our April TeacherTECH Technology Tools Series which is focused on using Inspiration™ in the classroom.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
4:30pm - 6:30pm
San Diego Supercomputer Center
Training Room
University of California, San Diego
What is Inspiration™?
This award winning software is based on proven visual learning methodologies that help students think, learn and achieve.
Inspiration software helps students to visualize ideas, concepts and relationships. Visual learning is a proven method in which ideas, concepts, data and other information are associated with images and represented graphically. Concept maps, idea maps and plots, such as stack plots and Venn plots, are some of the techniques used in visual learning to enhance thinking and learning skills. Creating these maps and charts is a snap with Inspiration! This software is dual platform and runs on both Windows and Mac OS X.
Learning to think. Learning to learn. These are the essential skills for student success in every curriculum area and academic pursuit. Research in both educational theory and cognitive psychology tells us that visual learning is among the very best methods for teaching students of all ages how to think and how to learn.
With the powerful combination of visual learning and technology, students in grades K-12 learn to clarify thoughts, organize and analyze information, integrate new knowledge and think critically.
Visual learning techniques help students:
* Clarify thoughts
* Organize and analyze information
* Integrate new knowledge
* Think critically
Workshop Description:
Participants will learn to help their students develop essential learning strategies as they create graphic organizers to visually represent concepts and relationships. Inspiration's integrated diagramming and outlining views and complementary learning capabilities work together to make Inspiration the essential tool to help students visualize, think, organize and learn.
During the workshop, participants will:
* Brainstorm ideas quickly with the RapidFire® tool. Capture thoughts with or without automatic links to symbols.
* Represent thoughts and information with pictures, images, words and multimedia-such as QuickTime® movies and MP3 files. Find just the right image from Inspiration's library of 1,000+ searchable symbols or insert a graphic from Inspiration's online symbol collection, containing more than 1 million illustrations and photographs.
* Show relationships among ideas with the Link tool. Explain relationships by adding text directly on the links.
* Explore ideas, record research and begin writing with visually integrated notes. New drag-and-drop capabilities make it easy to quickly gather research.
* Differentiate among ideas and groups with colors, shapes, patterns and fonts.
* Manage notes, audio and subtopic information with Quick Controls.
* Organize ideas effortlessly using the Arrange tool or use AutoArrange to automatically format diagrams as you work.
* Plan projects and track ideas using the Checklist feature.
How Educators Use Inspiration™:
Educators use Inspiration to customize instruction, achieve standards, assess student projects and energize learning. An expanded selection of 120+ cross-curricular templates in language arts, social studies, science, planning and thinking makes starting assignments quick and easy.
Visualize ideas, concepts and relationships
In Diagram View, students create graphic organizers — a core element of visual learning — to analyze, compare and evaluate information. They quickly brainstorm new ideas with the RapidFire tool, search the symbol collection to find images to represent any concept, and insert and play multimedia files. To show relationships between ideas, students link symbols and add words to further clarify meaning.
Improve writing proficiency
As they start the writing process, students use visually integrated notes to expand topics and switch to Outline View to further develop their ideas. The integrated Word Guide helps students choose words with more precision, and a contextual spell checker automatically identifies misspelled words. To finalize projects, students can transfer to their favorite word processor or transform their work into a web site with the Site Skeleton export tool.
Plan and organize projects
Inspiration helps students organize information, develop thinking skills and demonstrate knowledge. Drag-and-drop actions and hyperlinks make it easy to gather research and connect to files and web resources. As students develop their projects, they use AutoArrange to automatically format their diagrams.
Please join us for an exciting and informative session of hands-on learning presented by Mike Senise, San Diego Unified School District.
Registration is free. Space is limited. Please contact Ange Mason at 858-534-5064 or amason@ucsd.edu to reserve your space.
For additional information on other TeacherTECH workshops, including our summer workshops, or to download notes from previous workshops, please visit http://education.sdsc.edu/teachertech
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