Every lesson in the classroom tells a story. Whether it’s the story of how rain evaporates, how dinosaurs became extinct or how the seasons change, everything can be framed in a narrative. In fact, there’s a lot of evidence that supports teaching with a storytelling method. What’s more is that you can couple this method of introducing new concepts with visual diagrams or graphic organizers to better solidify new ideas in your students’ minds.
This week’s featured Inspired Site by Fayette County Public Schools in Kentucky is packed full of excellent resources on Inspiration® and Kidspiration®! Here, you’ll find scientifically based research on teaching with graphic organizers, links to tutorials on the Inspiration Software website and countless examples of how to use these tools in your classroom. This site also has a great list of additional resources by educators and educational institutions that may be extremely helpful when you’re looking at using these visual learning tools.
In Temple Grandin’s inspiring speech on TED.com titled “Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds,” she talks about how – as an autistic mind – she sees and thinks about the world around her in pictures. Grandin describes the minds of children and adults on the autism and Asperger spectrum as being unique and able to understand information visually. We can help these students better facilitate learning and pursue their talents by equipping them with visual learning tools.
This week’s featured Inspired Site by Wacona Elementary School in Georgia, highlights some examples of ways to use Inspiration® and Kidspiration® in the classroom. These examples are listed by the following subject areas: Language Arts, Math, Science and Social Studies. This site will help you get started on these tools, as well as provide some great visual examples. In fact, it even has recommendations for Classroom Management and Technical Tips!
On our website, we talk about how Webspiration Classroom™ service can improve the student-teacher work flow. In Webspiration Classroom, you can create assignments to post or distribute to your students. So today I’m going to talk about the specific tools in Webspiration Classroom that can help you achieve this and truly improve the way you plan your lessons and manage assignments.
Throughout history schools have been the place to go to if you wanted access to information and learn from experts. Whether imparted by a teacher or assigned readings from classroom textbooks, schools have historically been the place to get access to information and to learn the “right” answer. Teachers and students have traditionally lived in a true-or-false, multiple-choice world where only one answer was the correct answer and where learning was assessed by the number of correct answers.
As Diana Laufenberg states in her TED.com video entitled “Diana Laufenberg: How to Learn? From Mistakes,” educators have traditionally taught students that there is a right answer to every question. She argues that the focus on imparting information and requiring the “right-answers” is out-of-date and based on life models that our grandparents experienced – not the life models our children experience today. Laufenberg argues that the role of schools needs to move from providing expert knowledge to students to teaching students how to research, analyze, synthesize and process information that they actively gather from the vast resources available over the Internet. She believes that guided Experiential Learning, complete with its successes and failures, is the way to help students learn in today’s world.
This week’s featured Inspired Site is a website from District Five Schools of Spartanburg County in South Carolina, that showcases elementary and middle school examples and lesson plans in Kidspiration®. This Inspired Site is unique in that it covers a wide range of subjects. Here you’ll find lesson plan ideas for art, music, foreign languages, math, guidance counseling and more. It’s a great resource if you’re looking for something beyond the basics!
This week’s featured Inspired Site showcases elementary, middle school and high school templates and ideas from Cape Girardeau in Missouri. The templates span across all subject categories including, but not limited, to reading, writing, Language Arts, math, health, and science. This site makes it easy for you to download Inspiration® and Kidspiration® templates right to your computer. So, jump-start your next lesson with this excellent Inspired Site!
This month we have lesson plans across countless subject areas for Inspiration®, InspireData® and Kidspiration®. Discover how you can better incorporate these visual learning tools into your lesson plans and classroom activities with the following examples created by other educators just like you!
Do you have any lesson plans that you’ve created that would be a great addition to this month’s Inspired Calendar? Tell us at connect@inspiration.com.
