As many of you may already know, Inspiration® Software just released Inspiration® Maps™ on the iPad®, our visual thinking and outlining tool for brainstorming, note taking, and pre-writing. Inspiration Maps combines the intuitive touch interface of the iPad with our 20+ years of experience developing visual thinking and outlining tools that help students of all ages think, analyze, write and learn more effectively. So if you are an iPad user or find yourself having difficulty taking notes, generating topic ideas, organizing your thoughts and information, or structuring your writing, you may want to try Inspiration Maps on the iPad.
Only available via the Apple Apps store, you can download the free Inspiration Maps Lite version or purchase the Inspiration Maps, the full version.
Use Inspiration Maps on the iPad if you need to:
- Brainstorm, analyze and visualize ideas, processes and information
- Capture ideas and brainstorm freely without being interrupted by a need to fit into a formal structure. When you’re ready to make sense of your notes from your brainstorm, it takes only a few seconds to organize and form visual connections between your ideas and information.
- Easily build visual models such as webs, concept maps, cause and effect diagrams, process flows, and graphic organizers to aid and guide learning, improve retention and present knowledge.
Diagram View from Inspiration Maps
- Take notes, organize information, and gather research when reading informational texts or studying
- Taking visual notes makes it easy to relate information to points and data captured earlier in your note taking and to expand upon those notes. By drawing links and arrows you can quickly associate information and move on to the next thought or topic. If you haven’t tried visual note taking check out my blog post on why students should consider taking visual notes.
- Organize facts and information inside an Inspiration Maps diagram or outline. Document your sources by adding hyperlinks. Inspiration Maps detects hyperlinks and allows you to launch them with a single tap.
- Take advantage of working in diagram view or outline view – depending upon your project or the format that best fits your learning needs. As with Inspiration Software’s other visual learning tools, Inspiration Maps combines both visual mapping and outlining in one tool to meet your thinking and writing needs.
Outline View from Inspiration Maps
- Develop first drafts and easily move your work to an iPad word processor to finalize your writing
- Once you have your ideas captured or your notes taken, you can easily start writing with a simple tap on the outline icon in Inspiration Maps. From there you can rearrange in a logical flow and add notes to expand upon ideas.
- You can even transfer your Inspiration Maps outline directly to Pages or other iPad apps that support written document transfers to complete and polish your assignment.
So, if you want to improve your ability or your students’ ability to think and learn via your iPad, give Inspiration Maps a try. I think you will find it useful in maximizing iPads as a K-12 learning device.
