Educators across the United States and around the world use Inspiration® Software tools in their classrooms every day — and they love it! See what some of them have to say. If you would like to share how you've implemented Inspiration into your curriculum, we’d love to hear it. Email us today at marketing@inspiration.com [1].
In the past, students assigned a research paper may have found themselves in a state of confusion, sifting through Web sites, books and periodicals, scrawling out notecards and searching for ways to compile and organize their ideas and data into a written report. When library media center teacher Vicky Richter came to Benjamin Middle School in West Chicago, Ill., three years ago, she introduced students to Inspiration®, the ultimate thinking and learning tool to comprehend, create, communicate and achieve more, from Inspiration® Software, Inc., and there was no turning back to their former ways.
With Inspiration, Richter’s students are developing 21st century thinking skills – creating and organizing information, analyzing and identifying relationships, building understanding, and communicating what they’ve learned. The projects they create are thoughtful, organized and polished – a reflection of the higher level writing skills they’re gaining. “Inspiration turns writing into such a positive experience – there isn’t a comparable tool,” said Richter, who had previously used Inspiration when teaching in Texas. “Students are very visual, with all the games they play, and it makes sense to help them learn in a visual way, too.”
Richter works with classroom teachers at all grade levels at Benjamin Middle School to help them integrate visual learning into instruction. Using Inspiration, which is designed for learners grade 6 to adult, students build graphic organizers – including concept maps, webs, mind maps and idea maps – to brainstorm, plan, organize, think, outline and present their ideas. Whether she’s helping sixth graders who are studying animal species or eighth graders learning about Black History Month, Richter said she finds herself turning to Inspiration.
When the school’s seventh graders began a research project on national parks, they used Inspiration in their pre-writing process to take notes and break down the project into manageable pieces of information. As they explored the history of the parks, they organized the facts they found, arranging them in “bubbles” in their graphic organizers. Capturing this information with Inspiration allowed them to visually group data so they could identify the relevant information and pre-writing process. “They just plugged in all the pieces and then cut and pasted and turned them into outlines – it’s so easy with Inspiration,” said Richter.
An eighth-grade class found Inspiration a helpful way to guide them through a project examining the historical and cultural events that transpired during the 1960s. The students were able to gather information, explore it in detail, and then analyze, identify and interpret the significant events that defined the decade. “They love being able to begin with something simple and end with something very complex,” Richter explained.
While Benjamin Middle School serves a relatively small English Language Learner (ELL) population, it has seen a recent influx of students native to India and Vietnam. Richter said the ELL students appreciate Inspiration’s Listen and Record Sound tools, which allow them to hear their work read aloud or record their own words, aiding in their comprehension.
When she’s working with students on research projects, Richter stresses the importance of “spending time on the front end,” reading, analyzing and applying critical-thinking skills while organizing facts. When the students follow these steps in Inspiration, not only do they have a well-thought-out project when they’re finished with the writing, “but their bibliography is right there, too,” she noted.
When pulling information from various sources, some students may make others’ words theirs, either inadvertently or purposefully, so Richter gives them a lesson in plagiarism. She notes that Inspiration is helpful with this concept, as it helps students see the difference between a phrase they’ve written and one they’ve pulled from another document.
Richter appreciates the ease of moving content in Inspiration from graphic organizer to outline to a finished product – whether it’s a document or a presentation – and that everything is transparent. “When all their research is in the outline, they can go to the paper, and the teacher can see where everything came from – to see whether they understood,” she said.
The classroom teachers are very receptive to Richter’s work with the students on Inspiration projects, she said. “They see how Inspiration helps organize their thoughts and visualize where they’re going,” she explained. Some teachers make use of it themselves, including a math teacher who used Inspiration at the school’s open house to give parents a visual tour of how the year would progress.
Richter not only has her students use Inspiration for writing projects, but for other subjects as well, such as reading comprehension. Benjamin Middle School’s sixth-grade students are some of the school’s most enthusiastic users of Inspiration, she said, and they put it to use every chance they get. When they studied the novel “The Tree,” Inspiration was a useful tool for comprehending the story as they analyzed the plot, setting, and characters and demonstrated what they learned.
Richter was an Inspiration Software 2009 Best Project winner for her social studies project, in which students created a concept map of ancient Greece, incorporating four or five main ideas and branching off to smaller ideas. The project allowed students to share their thoughts with others visually, using Inspiration and an interactive whiteboard, encouraging collaborative learning in the classroom.
Project after project, the students are gaining familiarity with all that Inspiration has to offer, stepping up their use of the wide variety of features, said Richter. When they move on to high school, they'll continue down this path, “creating some amazing things with Inspiration,” she said.
Richter’s goal is to have the students at Benjamin Middle School use Inspiration at the start of every research and writing project. “It’s the very best way to ‘dump’ information where you want it,” she explained. “With Inspiration, the students go through the proper process, which means they’re able to create something that’s meaty. The teachers find it a great learning tool and the students love using it, so it’s a win-win for everyone.”
With 34 years of teaching behind her, science teacher Maryanne Porter is well-versed at finding ways to engage students in learning. Putting her skills to the test, Porter, along with two colleagues at Academy Park High School in Sharon Hill, Pa., located just outside of Philadelphia, recently began a pilot program to team-teach a class of 20 at-risk, ninth-grade students, many with discipline issues. Nearly every day, Porter reaches for Inspiration®, the ultimate thinking and learning tool to comprehend, create, communicate and achieve more, from Inspiration® Software, Inc., designed for learners in grade 6 to adult.
In this unique classroom, known as “305,” after the room in which it’s located, Porter collaborates with a math teacher and a language arts/special education teacher to give the students the focused attention, instruction and encouragement they need for academic success. The students share the same curriculum as other ninth-graders in the district, and must meet the same state standards. For lessons across the curriculum that require “higher level thinking,” Porter and her colleagues employ the help of Inspiration, which Porter has come to rely on since she began using it six years ago in a regular science classroom.
“I love Inspiration—we use it constantly,” she said. “It’s very user-friendly, and it makes it much easier for my students to organize their ideas. They have a lot of fun learning with it—it’s definitely a perk for them.”
Porter recalled the first time she and her colleagues saw a demonstration of Inspiration, nine years ago, by the district technology coordinator. “Here we were, a group of veteran teachers, and we couldn’t stop playing with it,” she said. Today, every computer at Academy Park is loaded with Inspiration, and “students are really taking off and moving far ahead with it,” she said.
The students of 305 use Inspiration to build graphic organizers—including concept maps, webs, mind maps and idea maps—to brainstorm, plan, organize, think, outline and present their ideas. Porter appreciates the ease with which it allows students to move from one format to another, she said. “It’s sensible, and it’s the way things should work. I don’t know if my students understand that it’s a big deal, but it is.”
Students in Porter’s class created this Inspiration diagram to relate new information with real world examples to better understand the six simple machines.
With each assignment, Porter has her students add more visual elements to their work, drawing from Inspiration’s extensive online libraries of clip art and symbols, or by adding their own images. “Inspiration allows students to bring their own creativity to their work. They can very easily add images that are meaningful to them, and everyone’s is different, not cookie-cutter,” she said.
For some students, seeing a visual representation of a concept is the only way to learn it, said Porter. “A traditional written outline doesn’t work for everyone,” she said. “But if they can see it in a graphic organizer, they know whether they’ve connected something in the right place, and it makes sense.”
In line with district goals, Porter is teaching vocabulary that relates to the curriculum, in response to research that suggests it results in improved achievement. So every week, Porter chooses an article about a current event in science that is relevant to a lesson she’s teaching in class. Next, she asks her students to choose four vocabulary words they read in the article. She then creates a vocabulary list from the most frequently selected words, and using the Word Guide in Inspiration, her students look up the definitions. Next, the class converts the vocabulary list into an outline, which becomes the study guide. And with just a few keystrokes, Porter creates a quiz. “This exercise puts the vocabulary words in context for them and gets them thinking. We’ve had some interesting discussions about the alternate meanings, and they remember what the words mean,” she said. “Some of my students are getting perfect scores on the quizzes every week.”
When Porter taught the electromagnetic spectrum, she used Inspiration to look at wavelength and frequency. When her students learned about lab safety and physics, she used Inspiration again. And her co-teachers in 305 use it for math vocabulary and writing assignments. “I can’t think of a topic for which it wouldn’t work,” she said.
Porter used Inspiration during a lesson on the electromagnetic spectrum. Adding visual elements provided her students with meaningful connections, reinforcing their comprehension of the concepts of wavelength and frequency.
Porter makes use of Inspiration for topics that are complex, but perhaps most valuable for her students is the ability to create a clean and polished finished product, which gives them pride in their work, she explained. “With Inspiration, you don’t have to be the best student to build something that looks nice. Some of my students have difficulty using a pencil, or other challenges. Inspiration helps level the playing field for struggling learners.”
Today, by any account, the students of 305 and Academy Park High School are succeeding, as discipline issues in the ninth grade, school-wide, have dropped by 90 percent. “These students are learning, and they’ll be ready for the 10th grade,” said Porter. “This class has made a huge difference, and Inspiration has definitely been a part of that.”
A teacher describing the functions of the organelles that make up a cell—with terms such as ribosome, lysosome and endoplasmic reticulum—can sometimes be met with a room full of glazed stares. In Cheryl Teaters’ high school classroom, students can’t get enough of it, showing up during their lunch periods and staying after school to perfect their “cell analogy projects.”
Teaters, who teaches biology at Gateway High School in Monroeville, Pa., has her ninth- and tenth-grade students draw a biological analogy to another structure, such as a school, an automobile or a city. A student comparing a cell to a city might label its city hall as the nucleus, the road system as the cytoskeleton and the power station as the mitochondria. In the past, Teaters has employed “the old posterboard method,” but this year she brought the project to life with Inspiration®, the essential tool to visualize, think, organize and learn from Inspiration Software®, Inc., and saw a new sense of enthusiasm for learning this important biology concept.
“We took a project that was simple in elements to a much more complex level,” said Teaters. “It forced students to look at the parts and what they meant, and Inspiration was the perfect tool to do that.”
Teaters’ students constructed Inspiration “webs”—or visual maps—of a cell and the structure to which they compared it. To strengthen their learning of the composition of a cell, she asked them to draw the cell using Inspiration’s drawing tool. For each organelle, students found a corresponding function in their analogous structure and created a visual representation of the connection. With Inspiration’s vast library of symbols, graphics and photos, as well as images they imported, students were able to depict virtually anything they could visualize.
Teaters’ students constructed Inspiration “webs”—or visual maps—of a cell and the structure to which they compared it.
Perhaps the most common choice for the analogy was a shopping mall, where the information desk was usually compared to the nucleus of a cell, said Teaters, but she was impressed with the wide variety of ideas students presented, including a sporting event, a musical, a play, a marching band, a cruise ship, a factory, an airport and a household.
Using Inspiration’s audio and video features, students were able to add a deeper dimension to the project—something that would be impossible with posterboard. For example, some added narrations, and others followed suit. “My students loved using Inspiration for this project. Their creativity could flow,” she said.
When students completed their projects, they turned them in electronically, and from her computer, Teaters evaluated the thinking behind each part of the analogies, checking links and viewing the audio and visual components. “I was amazed. They far exceeded my expectations,” she said.
When comparing using Inspiration to the posterboard method, the advantages were clear. “My students were much more interested in the project, they cared more about it and they took more ownership of it. They wanted it to be perfect, and it added some healthy competition to the project.”
Teaters entered her cell analogy project in Inspiration Software’s Inspired Visual Learning Awards, and out of more than 220 entries from around the world, the project was selected for one of three Gold Star Awards, the award program’s highest level of recognition.
At every opportunity, Teaters incorporates technology into learning, using computers for a range of lessons, maintaining a class website and having her students create podcasts. “Technology is such a part of their culture, and it helps to teach in a world they understand,” she said. Inspiration is an integral part of her teaching, and she uses it throughout the school year to teach all kinds of concepts.
When she first introduces Inspiration to students who haven’t used it before, they are off and running with little explanation, she said. “Inspiration is such a user-friendly program that it takes less than one class period for them to explore it and see all the different capabilities they can use.”
They’ve also used Inspiration to do concept mapping on photosynthesis, cell transport, mitosis and meiosis. “It’s like a big, white piece of paper where they can move things around easily,” she said. Gateway High School’s math teachers have found Inspiration to be “one of the best tools for concept learning” in support of a schoolwide initiative to teach literacy skills across the curriculum.
Cindy Strotman, an English teacher at Gateway, is using concept learning in her classroom, too. In the past, she would use a desktop publishing program to have her students create concept maps, but she found it to be time-consuming. When planning a lesson on the short story “The Birds,” she decided to try Inspiration. “Sometimes technology can be so intimidating, and I knew nothing about the software, but just by opening and playing with it for three minutes, I could use it,” she said.
Her students caught on quickly, too, and were able to generate their own concept maps, whereas in the past, she had them fill out a concept map she had created. “They can draw them at their desks, and no two look the same. Students are more excited about creating them this way, and they have fun while learning the skills we need them to learn,” she said. Strotman finds Inspiration’s symbol library of tremendous benefit, she said. “It is so much better than what I had previously used. My students’ work is more visually attractive, and they’re inspired to ‘jazz it up.’ ”
After seeing its value in analyzing “The Birds,” Strotman turned to Inspiration to teach numerous literary works throughout the school year. Next, she plans to use Inspiration to teach writing. “I can see its potential is limitless in the English classroom,” she said. “Inspiration holds students’ interest and enhances our literacy initiatives schoolwide.”
In 1909, Cathedral School in Raleigh, N.C. first opened its doors in a two-room schoolhouse while historic events were unfolding around the globe: the Wright brothers were gaining international celebrity for their flying machines, the United States was signing a treaty with Colombia to build the Panama Canal and the first human was setting foot on the North Pole. In celebration of Cathedral School’s centennial, today’s students discovered the history that shaped North Carolina, the United States and the world over the past century—using Inspiration® 8, the essential tool to visualize, think, organize and learn from Inspiration Software®, Inc.
In this Catholic school serving 270 students in grades pre-kindergarten through eight, Kim Seder, the director of information and educational technology, in collaboration with classroom teachers and the school principal, created a project where students would construct Inspiration “webs”—or visual maps— to research, organize and evaluate significant events that occurred over the last 100 years. Seder selected templates from Inspiration’s expansive selection to use as the framework, and the students were off and running with the project.
“We wanted our kids to understand that Cathedral School students were here and prayed for people serving in the world wars and for the victims of the Titanic,” said Donna Moss, principal. “Inspiration was a great tool for stepping back and looking at the past in a way that was easy to understand, and the software never got in the way of the creativity.”
The students who were assigned the project—fourth through eighth graders—divided into groups to address individual decades, and some groups examined individual years. To align the project with diocesan standards, the teachers assigned fourth graders to North Carolina state history, fifth graders to U.S. history and middle school students to world history. “Inspiration makes it so easy to integrate projects into our curriculum,” said Seder. Students scoured online resources for events they found noteworthy. Using Inspiration as a brainstorming tool, the students were able to narrow down the list to the most relevant facts. With the vast library of clip art and photos in Inspiration, students graphically depicted each historical event.
Cathedral School fourth graders used Inspiration® to capture, categorize and organize their research on North Carolina state history.
“They loved searching for facts, and it was interesting to see which events caught their attention,” said Seder. “This project gave students an overview of history in an easy way, and Inspiration was the perfect tool. It would have been very difficult to organize the material without Inspiration Software,” she said.
Inspiration is a tool Seder reaches for time and time again, using it to help students visually outline and organize research papers and to create timelines. She said the classroom teachers often use it to introduce a concept. “Inspiration gives students such an amazing view of the subject. It’s a nice alternative to using traditional presentation software,” she said.
Working with Seder on the centennial project was Lisa Reidy, the social studies teacher to Cathedral’s middle school students. “It was an interesting project from every standpoint,” she said. “The students just took off with it, and my role was to coach them as they went along, to help them see what was important.”
Reidy’s students worked in groups, each looking for one significant event in a particular decade, such as the invention of the automobile, the Treaty of Versailles or the onset of World War I. “A lot of these events are things that adults take for granted that everyone knows, but they were new to the students. Now they have an overview,” she said.
Reidy found the project a valuable way to teach students how to conduct a research project, as well as an opportunity for writing practice. “I can get a lot more out of them with Inspiration because they love the technology,” she said. Students appreciate the ability to add elements to their Inspiration projects such as audio, video, pictures, diagrams and presentations, she noted. “The students learn how to organize and put everything together so it makes sense.”
Inspiration®’s Symbol Library provided Cathedral School middle school students with visual ways to represent historical world facts from the 1970s.
When her students completed their sections of the centennial project, Reidy went into Inspiration and checked their work—and was impressed with what she saw, she said. She had asked them for feedback about how they felt about their projects, too. “They gave me a lot of mature answers—that they learned so much and that they did it for their school. I loved what they had to say.”
Seder pointed out that a unique aspect of the centennial project was its inclusion of all the students in the school. While the older students created the Inspiration project documenting historical events, Cathedral School’s younger students joined in the festivities, too, making centennial art projects. “It was exciting to bring everyone together and work on something as a school,” she said. Added Reidy, “The students liked seeing what the other grades were doing and being part of something bigger.”
Reidy said the students had much pride in their work throughout the process and excitement that the end result would be on the school web site for all to see—for their families, school alumni, church parish members and others in the community. “I told them it shows people how far we’ve come with technology in our school,” she said.
When the project was complete, Seder entered it in Inspiration Software’s Inspired Visual Learning Awards. Out of more than 200 entries from around the world, the Cathedral School centennial project was selected for one of three Gold Star Awards, the award program’s highest level of recognition. “The students were already so excited about the project,” said Reidy, “and winning the award was the icing on the cake.” To see the students’ centennial project, go to www.cathedral-school.net/centennialproject/default.htm [6].
“Graphic organizers aren’t just for English classes,” emphasizes Jennifer Blair, Instructional Technology Facilitator for West Memorial Junior High in Katy, Texas. “Students can and should use graphic organizers in any subject requiring reading.” A 2007 Inspired Teacher Scholarship recipient, Blair works with educators throughout her school to integrate Inspiration® and visual learning techniques with cross-curricular instructional strategies.
Blair, who has used Inspiration for almost ten years, taught in the classroom for several years. Having acquired an in-depth knowledge of instructional strategies, she helps other teachers learn how to integrate technology and visual learning into daily instruction. For example, note-taking is one area in particular where Blair believes technology and visual learning complement the learning process. She shows students and teachers how to use Inspiration to take notes in any area across the curriculum. Students begin in Diagram View where they create graphic organizers to organize their information and notes. Then they can switch to Outline View to add details and study their notes. “Many students grasp the information much easier when they can take notes using a graphic organizer rather than just answering questions from a textbook,” says Blair.
The district, which Blair describes as "strategy-driven," advocates the use of CRISS (Creating Independence through Student-owned Strategies) to teach students how to learn. Project CRISS emphasizes a clear path to learning which involves reading for understanding, discussing and organizing main ideas, and reflecting on or writing about the learning. (For more information about Project CRISS, see www.projectcriss.org.) Blair feels that Inspiration works seamlessly with these strategies as a way for students to take notes, organize information and, by switching to Outline View, prepare to write about the learning. New features in Inspiration 8, such as the variety of templates, more than 1 million symbols and the Word Guide—an integrated dictionary and thesaurus, help students more precisely organize and write. “I want students to develop the mental condition where they think about how they learn best and then use those strategies,” says Blair.
According to school Principal Patti Shafer, Blair’s efforts are paying off. “It is exhilarating to watch teachers and students get excited about the use of technology,” Shafer says. “Jennifer makes this happen through visual learning.”
Jennifer Blair uses Inspiration® to help junior high students implement learning strategies, such as taking notes, summarizing and organizing information, and writing about their learning.
As a member of the district's Social Studies Advanced Placement Vertical Team, Blair works closely with the social studies teachers to integrate Inspiration. She offers Inspiration training courses, works with teachers to demonstrate how visual learning matches up with objectives and standards, and creates lessons specifically designed to meet curriculum requirements.
This year, she is also training the teachers to create incomplete scenario questions in Inspiration, the type that are often found on the state tests. The comprehensive exam in social studies is administered for the first time at the end of the 8th grade year, so it is important for teachers to prepare students for the types of questions they might encounter.
This type of incomplete scenario question is often encountered on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS), the exam given at the end of 8th grade. Inspiration helps teachers easily create these types of questions.
Blair looks forward to working more with teachers in the school to integrate Inspiration across the curriculum. She is proud that her school currently has the most Inspiration files on the district server, even though they are the smallest school. She plans to continue the school’s success by providing additional Inspiration training that focuses on concrete examples to improve students’ thinking and learning strategies. “When students use Inspiration they get excited about learning,” concludes Blair. “Students need to develop the ability to create things on their own. Inspiration allows them to be self-sufficient.”
High school students use the power of visual learning to brush up their understanding of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Senior Honors English teacher Vicki Broadhead uses Inspiration to help students understand the play’s characters, its metaphors, and its major themes. Students create character webs, map out the play’s scenes, and make graphic organizers representing the metaphors they discover in the densely written lines.
“I’ve developed a plan of what I want to happen,” said Broadhead. “But even my best students need more time to understand Shakespeare than they do for other pieces of literature.”
The process of making character web diagrams helped students comprehend Lady Macbeth, Banquo, and the other characters more fully by linking their actions, motives, and interactions with one another. And the webs helped students justify their impressions of these literary characters because they cited specific text as part of the diagramming process.
Using an Inspiration template made it easy for students to start a character web. For Lady Macbeth, Broadhead’s students selected Template under the File menu, then clicked on Language Arts – Character Web. This template gave them a starter document for mapping out Lady Macbeth’s key characteristics. After entering her name in the “primary character” main idea symbol, students then entered her characteristics into subsymbols, linking each to examples and details in the play’s text. For example, under “ambitious,” they cited the lines in which Lady Macbeth encouraged her husband to commit murder in order to become king.
As they made their way through the play, the students continued to edit their character webs as they discovered more. At the same time, they used graphic organizers to investigate the play’s other components, such as scene development and major themes. Inspiration gave students a visual tool to name, organize, and express the play’s many dimensions. Each student had the opportunity to understand the whole of Macbeth, from character development to moral lessons.
Graphic organizers created in Inspiration help Vicki Broadhead’s students study more effectively and get better grades on their Honors English tests.
Inspiration also gave Broadhead the ability to create templates herself, such as the one used by students to map out scenes. Inspiration templates made it easy to get started on a specific lesson while still keeping students focused on the play. To create the template, Broadhead selected the type of graphic organizer she wanted students to use. With Macbeth as the main idea, and each scene as a subtopic, students then used the template to quickly capture and organize the events of each scene. Broadhead noted that she enjoyed the flexibility to customize a template for Macbeth and then to leave that same template openended for use with other plays.It takes more than Lady Macbeth’s flickering candle to shed light on Shakespeare for eager Honors English students. It takes the visual learning power of Inspiration to ignite students’ interest in classical literature.
Part of the power of visual learning lies in its clarity. “When the material is done well, viewers seem to absorb the meanings almost intuitively,” says Hoppy Chandler, a high school teacher in San Diego, California. “Understanding happens with less effort.”
A few choice words, symbols, and links smartly arranged into a diagram like those created by Inspiration are “very effective in explaining complex concepts or conveying ideas,” he continues. “And the format is so different from the norm that students want to look. They can’t help but learn.”
In addition to teaching, Chandler serves as Twain’s Digital High School coordinator, and has been involved with an ILAST state grant for professional development. He continues to provide technology support and training for his colleagues. Chandler has used Inspiration for more than 10 years and also trained “thousands” of his peers in its use. He’s a champion for the visual learning tool. This software lets people build diagrams and outlines with “amazing speed,” he notes, and for an endless variety of purposes. His own applications, for example, include planning lessons, making handouts for students, and creating training materials for other educators.
“What I like best about using Inspiration is that as fast as you can type, you’re generating ideas; you’re brainstorming. Call it ‘mind on task’ time; it’s invaluable! Then—and this is truly liberating—the program automatically reorganizes it for you as elements get added, deleted, modified, and moved around.” explains Chandler.
Chandler’s enthusiasm for the software is compelling. Two San Diego City Unified schools, Lincoln Senior High, where he taught previously, and Twain Junior/Senior High, his current campus home, have purchased dozens of copies of Inspiration for students and staff to use. “I’ve even gotten a few administrators intrigued enough to at least fiddle around with it,” chuckles the veteran teacher.
Twain is a continuation school, enrolling from 650 to 1,000 students in grades 7-12 drawn from all over San Diego. It has older computers, mostly Macintoshes, and licenses for 65 copies of Inspiration. Chandler teaches English and social studies to grades 9-12 at Twain, and his students use Inspiration routinely for class work—especially for writing and planning projects. In the beginning, however, these reluctant learners are known to resist.
“Early on I have my students do a genealogy of their family with an Inspiration diagram,” says Chandler. “They usually balk until they get about halfway through the project, and then, suddenly, it’s ‘oh, I get it.’ That’s when they start to see how useful this program can be.” After creating their family trees using Inspiration’s library of more than 1,250 symbols, Chandler encourages the teens to bring in family photographs. Once digitized, the photos can replace symbols, making the final project a unique personal history worth saving.
“Another sure-fire way to hook someone’s interest is my two minute drill,” says Chandler. “I show how to go from Inspiration to a PowerPoint slide show in just three steps (create, export, open) in less than two minutes! It’s pretty slick.”
Chandler emphatically singles out Inspiration’s positive impact on students’ writing. With one click, Inspiration instantly transforms diagrams into outlines. In a traditional hierarchical outline, students quickly organize the flow of information and structure their writing. And since it’s simple to move topics around, Chandler believes his students are using some of the time they save to think and to reflect about what, exactly, they want their words to convey.
“They clearly do better writing with Inspiration,” he states simply. “It takes two or three assignments for them to realize that—and a lot of motivation on their part to follow through—but now their written work is starting to actually say something. They are bringing their stories to life.”
One student’s experience illustrates how Inspiration projects can open new doors unexpectedly. Twain Junior/Senior High requires its students to pass a senior exit interview, a verbal examination by a panel of teachers in which students must demonstrate some of what they have learned.
As Chandler recalls, this particular student attended the continuation school because she had become a mother at about age 14. For her exit interview, she gave an oral history presentation on the Holocaust. She had started off with an Inspiration outline, he says, though she took it farther by exporting her work to a presentation program. “This student stood up in her exit interview and just wowed all of us,” remembers Chandler. “She knew her material cold, and was polished and poised, a real natural speaker.”
By happenstance, the district’s Superintendent Technology Advisory Committee, including the superintendent, were on the Twain campus soon after the student’s presentation. She was asked to give her presentation again. “She spoke for 45 minutes, entertained questions, and just knocked them out,” says Chandler, who was at both sessions. “And it all began with Inspiration.”
Inspiration, the powerful visual thinking software tool, supports learning in schools across the country by inspiring students to brainstorm, organize, plan and create. In Nebraska, the State Department of Education uses Inspiration Software's flagship product to help manage the complex issues involved with implementing state standards, to understand President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" initiative, to plan education events and to guide and recap community presentations and planning sessions.
A 30-year veteran of the Nebraska Department of Education, John Clark is aware of the agency’s intricate structure and the complex issues it faces. Led by the State Commissioner of Education, the department carries out state and federal statutes and the policy directions of the State Board of Education. It acts on behalf of Nebraska students in public, private and nonpublic school systems and interacts with colleges and universities.
In his role as Administrator for Communication Systems, Clark is responsible for helping staff members ensure that the department’s internal and external audiences understand the issues on the agency’s agenda so that they can make informed decisions on both state and local levels. In 1995, he was looking for a software tool that would help him do this when he saw Inspiration in a magazine. Clark says he quickly ordered an evaluation copy. It arrived at his office early one afternoon, and he spent the rest of the day immersed in the visual thinking software. “I kept calling people into my office and saying ‘Look what I can do,’” he says. “Since then, the product has expanded and grown.”
Like other states, Nebraska is in the process of implementing state standards. Clark found it virtually impossible to illustrate standards in a traditional way because of the dependencies and integration amongst the various audiences and curricular areas. Yet it is critical that the members of the State Board of Education have a clear picture of the state’s process for adopting the standards structure. To help department staff and state board members visualize their roles, Clark began to use Inspiration to develop a flow chart that illustrates the process for adopting standards.
Clark says this flow chart started as an 11 by 17 inch document and has grown to a wall-size poster that is also used for display at other events as a graphic tool for guiding the progress of the state’s schools.
Clark also used Inspiration to develop a similar chart tracking the timeline for President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” initiative, which was then presented to the board and school district audiences to demonstrate the massive nature of this education act.
Clark says that Nebraska Commissioner of Education Doug Christensen is also a visual thinker who used to draw on flip charts with markers when making the many public presentations that are part of his responsibilities as the state’s chief educator. Clark used Inspiration to develop a concept map from Christensen’s presentations. Now each time Christensen presents, new ideas are captured in Inspiration. This is particularly useful when Christensen is meeting with community-based groups and other constituents who are sharing their opinions on education in Nebraska. The result, says Clark, is always a living, growing document—not flipcharts that often sit on a shelf in the office rolled up with a rubber band around them.
The Nebraska Department of Education uses Inspiration to visually illustrate the process for adopting standards, shown in this excerpt of the state's three-year plan.
Clark also says he and his colleagues use Inspiration to plan the numerous events that the department hosts. “The fun part of Inspiration is that you can do a proportional time scale, with appropriate distance between events. You can schedule programs, then evaluate your scheduling and make minor time tweaks and other changes,” he says. “You can do all of this live while you are in a meeting so that the plan grows as you meet and you have a product at the end. And the document is created by the planners—not by support staff following the meeting.”
The Nebraska Department of Education also uses Inspiration for what Clark calls “conversation capture” at large scale, multi-session events. For example, the department recently hosted a series of “Policy Partner Forums” at four different locations around the state. Teachers, school board members and Intermediate Unit leaders participated in this three- to four-hour discussion session on the topic of effective use of data from student assessment. Recording and compiling the discussion at these types of events used to be “excruciating,” says Clark. “You had a room full of tables, two pages of flip chart per table, and then you had to try to get a report out in a timely manner. It was awful.”
Inspiration has changed all that. At the recent meetings, as table presenters reported their discussions, they were quickly recorded using Inspiration’s RapidFire® tool. In 30 minutes flat, five to six tables had reported their discussions, and their ideas were graphically illustrated in an integrated document. After four meetings, the combined Inspiration diagram was switched to outline format and exported to Microsoft Word. The result was a six-page summary document to communicate the results of the meetings to state board members and forum participants.
Clark also uses Inspiration to create conceptual histories that help new members joining the department’s work groups understand program history and interrelationships. For example, he used Inspiration with a statewide committee that was looking at language arts education responsibilities in both K-12 schools and colleges and universities. He worked with the group of classroom teachers, college professors and school administrators to capture their discussions and illustrate the responsibilities that they were defining. “When one of the university faculty members saw what I was doing with Inspiration, he immediately said ‘I’ve got to have that,’” says Clark.
Because the information that Clark was recording in Inspiration combined all meeting discussions in one diagram, committee members saw their progress and often realized that as they moved further along in their discussions, ideas or concepts from earlier meetings fit into the picture in a new way. The diagram became a flow chart and progress report that the committee ultimately presented to the board of education.
Clark says he uses Inspiration maps as his handouts when he makes presentations. That way attendees have the whole conceptual schema of the presentation in one document. “When graphical people used to try to share ideas, they had to resort to drawing diagrams on placemats and then revising them over and over,” he says. “Today, you can just use Inspiration.”
Things haven’t always been this rosy at Skyview High School. Students in Tom Stahley’s science class used to feel overwhelmed by their schoolwork. They took notes and studied for tests, but struggled with the difficult process of organizing and prioritizing information. Many students couldn’t determine what information was important, so they took notes on everything. Later, when they reviewed their notes, all the insignificant facts they had written made studying time consuming and often ineffective.
Tom Stahley, a science teacher at Skyview, was concerned about his students’ problems. He wanted to find a way to help them improve their skills in note taking and organization. An adventurous user of Inspiration, he thought the students would benefit from using the techniques of visual learning when studying and organizing for tests. Together with teachers from two other city high schools, Stahley organized a state-funded research project with ninth- and tenth-grade students. His goal was to determine if using graphic organizers as study tools, such as those created in Inspiration, could be the key to helping students organize their notes in a logical, effective way.
For the first part of the research project, the students studied a challenging passage of text. Stahley evaluated their notes and found that only 18 percent of the students were able to organize their work effectively. The students then took a quiz on the material from the text. The students’ test scores reflected their weak study skills and lack of organization.
Graphic organizers created in Inspiration help Tom Stahley’s students study more effectively and get better grades on their science tests.
Students were taught how to use Inspiration to record important information and prepare for tests. They used the computer to practice constructing concept maps and mind maps, illustrating their key points in Inspiration with colors and symbols.
The students also learned important steps to keep in mind when collecting and organizing information. By following some basic guidelines when working in Inspiration, the students could determine what information was essential and what was not as significant. “Many students enjoyed the visual organization strategies,” commented Stahley. “They took time to seek out pertinent information and paid more attention to how they were organizing content.”
After spending several weeks learning about Inspiration and graphic organizers, the students were ready to be tested on the skills they were practicing. They read a second science passage and used the new organization techniques they had learned to take notes in Inspiration. Then they took a test over the material. Stahley found that an astounding 81 percent of the students organized information effectively after learning to use Inspiration to create graphic organizers, and 36 percent of the students showed improvement on their test scores!
Following the study, many of the students were so excited about Inspiration, they began using it in their other classes to help them organize class notes. Some of the students shared with their other teachers how much Inspiration had helped them. Because of the students’ and teachers’ enthusiasm, Inspiration training is now available throughout the district. According to the teachers involved in the study, “We want to get the word out about the powerful effect Inspiration has on students’ motivation and learning!”
Students at Pope John Paul II, a preschool through eighth grade school in Citrus County, Florida, are clamoring to use Inspiration to help them study for tests. The results of a recent social studies test proved that visual learning techniques helped the students remember information better than just reading the chapter. Plus, they had a great time working as a team to learn new information.
In October 2002, students in eighth grade social studies were having trouble concentrating on their work. The students’ lack of motivation prompted their teacher to assign them an entire chapter to read and study; a test over the material would follow the next day. School principal Lou Whitaker heard about the students’ assignment and decided it would be a great opportunity to help them use Inspiration to study for their test. She asked the eighth graders to read the social studies chapter and then bring their textbooks to the computer lab the following day.
Using a computer connected to a television screen, Whitaker led the students in a discussion of their social studies chapter. Together, they worked in Inspiration to determine the main idea and then place subtopics and supporting details into their diagram. “They were very engaged,” recalls Whitaker. “The students were able to teach other students and help each other learn. They really enjoyed working with Inspiration.”
The students ran out of time with only half of the chapter mapped out, so they did a quick review of the Inspiration diagram they had created and left to take the test. The next day, Whitaker asked the students how they had done on the test. “Oh, Mrs. Whitaker, we all got C's! said the students.
Surprised by the average scores, Whitaker investigated further and found that the students had earned A's on the first half of the test and F’s on the second half. They knew all the answers from the part of the chapter that was diagrammed in Inspiration. "They could see the diagram in their minds and remember the connections between the information," says Whitaker. "But when they came to questions from the last half of the chapter, they couldn't recall what they had read."
In less than two hours, Lou Whitaker learned how to use Inspiration and built this diagram on neurons for a pesentation
Whitaker wanted to find out how the eighth graders felt about the study method, so she gave them a survey asking questions about Inspiration. The results showed that 73 percent of the students said that using Inspiration to review chapter material helped them a great deal, and 86 percent felt they would have done better on the test if they had used Inspiration to review the entire chapter.
The dramatic results from the students’ test didn’t really surprise Whitaker. She’s been recommending Inspiration in presentations and workshops since 1999, after discovering it while doing research for a presentation on brain-based education. In less than two hours she had explored the program and built a diagram to demonstrate a part of the brain. Whitaker was impressed with Inspiration—not only how appropriate it was for brain-based education, but also how easy it was to learn and use. In fact, she decided to include Inspiration in her presentation, demonstrating how to use the software as a tool to enhance learning. “I'm sure the reason I received such great evaluations was because of Inspiration,” laughs Whitaker.
In her Kidspiration and Inspiration presentations, Whitaker often asks for a show of hands to find out who is currently using the software. As hands go up, she asks for feedback on the programs. “I’ve never heard a negative comment,” says Whitaker. “Educators say that once their teachers get comfortable with it, the students love it, and the key is just practice.”
Whitaker hopes to get her sixth through eighth grade teachers up and running with Inspiration during the remainder of the 2003 school year. Thanks to the spontaneous “action research” performed earlier in the year, she has confidence in the benefits of using Inspiration to help students learn to study and take notes.
Whitaker relates, “What’s great about Inspiration is that it can be used as a teaching tool no matter what subject area you teach—science, social studies, math—it hits them all. If teachers have sequential thinkers in their classroom, they can give them an outline. For the visual thinkers, they can give them a diagram. The program meets everyone's needs.”
Students coming in early to work on projects? Entering and winning competitions, and training other students to use software? No, it isn’t a dream sequence in a movie. It is just another normal day at Queensbury Union Free School District in Queensbury, New York.
Inspiration fever is spreading fast here, fueled by the enthusiasm of Kyle Gannon’s sixth grade language arts class. The students competed in the Student Technology Expo supported by Columbia University’s North Hudson Electronic Education Empowerment Project (NHEEEP), where they won top honors for their age group by presenting story webs created with Inspiration.
Gannon used to do semantic mapping with his students on a dry erase board. But the process was often cumbersome and frustrating. Students each had to read the same book and it was difficult to hold their attention. Even so, Gannon felt that mapping was necessary. “Writing is so important. You have to become a dominant writer to become a dominant student, but every teacher hears ‘I don’t know what to write’ all the time. Mapping helps students get their creative energy "owing so they can begin the writing process.”
Today, mapping and writing is easier for Gannon’s students. Now they are each free to pick their own books and then do their own maps using Inspiration. “This allows students to have some choice in what they are doing. It really helps them feel like the project is their own,” says Gannon. “As they read their books, they are thinking about their maps. Oftentimes, they can tell me which symbols will be used for each topic before they sit down at a computer!”
After finishing their reading, the students set o$ to the computer lab. Here they begin to “web out” their stories using Inspiration. According to their teacher, “They like to type, so getting them to put their ideas down is easy. And they love to use Inspiration’s brainstorming tool, RapidFire®. . . it’s a chance to get all their great ideas out as quickly as possible.”
For most students, the first step in developing their maps is to search the Internet to find a photo of the book cover. After dragging and dropping this image into their diagram, it becomes their new main idea. Before using the Internet though, students discuss plagiarism. “We have to be very careful about plagiarism. Students don’t even think about it until we talk about it. But I tell them that they must try to get permission for everything they bring into Inspiration from the Internet.”
Then it’s time to flesh out their work with research. Gannon sends his students on an Internet search to find out more about the story and its author. For each site they discover, the students place a hyperlink into their diagrams. “They love to hyperlink to web pages. To click on a link and actually have it open a page with information that pertains to their topic is great.”
To compete in the NHEEEP expo, several of Gannon’s students took their writing projects a step further. Gannon opened the computer lab before school for several days and students voluntarily (and excitedly) came in each morning to work on creatively customizing and enhancing their diagrams. They learned how to change the colors of symbols, make di$erent types of links, and personalize their outlines by changing topic fonts and colors. They also expanded their web research and added hyperlinks to online author chats.
As his students’ knowledge grew, so did their confidence. “Anytime there was a computer free, students were begging to use Inspiration. Many of them have now advanced beyond my capabilities with the program,” says Gannon.
Finally, it was show time for the tech expo crew. Gannon loaded up the laptops, a monitor, and seven of his most inspired students and o$ they went. As the students began showing their projects to a group of judges, the ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ they heard when they changed a diagram into an outline fueled their excitement.
Many of the other school districts at the expo were not familiar with Inspiration, but thanks to Gannon’s students, everyone knew about the program by the time the day was over. Throughout the show, his students displayed diagrams on Harry Potter, Julie of the Wolves, and Treasure Island to teachers and students from about 30 other NHEEEP schools.
Enthusiasm generated by the presentation even caught the attention of a local television crew at the show, and the students were invited to present their projects on TV! When the day ended, the group was awarded top honors for their age division and received a digital camera for their prize. According to their teacher, the students immediately saw an inspiring use for this new toy. “Now they can’t wait to take pictures to include in their diagrams!”
Easy-to-use visual learning tool helps students earn top scores
Many students rely on Inspiration® for help with their most challenging assignments. Using Inspiration for both classroom assignments and homework, students easily move their projects along from initial brainstorming to successful completion. What’s more, Inspiration helps students improve the quality of their work—resulting in impressive grades and praise from their teachers.
Inspiration helped Kristen Humberger complete a thoughtful, well-organized project for her history class. A junior at Massaponax High School in Virginia, Kristen was struggling with an assignment about events leading to the Civil War. Kristen had thoroughly researched the topic and had gathered so much information she didn’t know where to start. She was having trouble finding just the right way to creatively organize and present her work. Kristen’s mom, Diane Humberger, had recently completed an Inspiration introduction class in the school district where she works. She convinced Kristen to try using Inspiration to develop her project.
Within minutes Kristen learned the basics of Inspiration. She began her Inspiration diagram by creating a graphic for each event leading to the Civil War. She organized events into a timeline, linked information, and added descriptions and resulting consequences. To further illustrate her ideas, Kristen then added graphics from Inspiration’s extensive symbol library, including pictures of Abe Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, and other government and historical symbols.
Kristen’s seven-page project earned a perfect score and an "excellent" from her history teacher. The teacher even asked to keep Kristen’s project to show other students as an example of creativity and organization.
Pleased with the success of her history project, Kristen started using Inspiration for assignments in other classes. She’s looking forward to using Inspiration for senior chemistry, biology, and government assignments this school year. “I particularly like two things about Inspiration. It’s easy to use and it has neat graphics,” she says.
Maris Cohen, an eighth grader at Bryn Mawr School in Maryland, began using Inspiration six years ago. Her mom, Cheryl Cohen, a library media specialist and former English teacher, introduced her to the program. “We would use the templates to play word games,” says Maris. Since then, she has used Inspiration for many different types of school projects.
Kristen Humberger used Inspiration to organize her thoughts and create a seven-page report for an assignment.
One project Maris completed for an ancient history class made a big impression on her teacher. The assignment involved demonstrating the cultural effects of monsoons on the people of India. After researching this topic, Maris used Inspiration to organize the various effects of monsoons into categories. To visually enhance her project, she then imported photos depicting India’s people and way of life from the Internet. The result was a stunning diagram reflecting Maris’ thorough research and artistic design. “Without Inspiration I would have spent hours on this project. Now it just looks like I did!” says Maris.
Her teacher was so impressed with the final project she gave Maris an A+. She also showed Maris’ project to the class as an example of what she expected of them—organized, concise, creative work. Then she contacted Maris’ mom to get more information about Inspiration!
Both Kristen and Maris will continue using Inspiration in their schoolwork. “I plan to use Inspiration this year in homework and classroom assignments,” says Kristen. “I’m not sure if many students in our schools are aware of how helpful it can be and how easy it is to learn.”
When teachers from Denver Public Schools put Inspiration® and Kidspiration® on the top of their technology wish list, district administrators discovered that the Inspiration Software® Comprehensive License Program was an easy, cost-effective and legally licensed way to put the visual learning software products at their fingertips. Now with the graphic organizers loaded on all instructional computers, teachers in grades K-12 are using visual learning across the curriculum to help students develop strong thinking and organizational skills and improve their academic performance.
More than 250 teachers from Denver Public Schools went to the Colorado Technology in Education Conference looking for new ways to use technology to improve teaching and learning for the city’s 73,000 students. In follow-up workshops with many of these teachers, they expressed a strong interest in using Inspiration and Kidspiration in their classrooms and schools.
Educational Technology Specialist Lee Hayward says it is rare to find teachers agreeing on the same new instructional tool, but when his district’s teachers talk about using Inspiration and Kidspiration, their enthusiasm is apparent.
“I love Kidspiration for grades K to 5 because it is so incredibly versatile,” says Erin Daly, a technology teacher at Schenck Elementary School. “I adapt any curricular lesson to use Kidspiration. Visual organizers are available for math, science, language arts or social studies. It is an essential tool in my tech lab.”
Many Denver teachers were already using Inspiration and Kidspiration before the movement for districtwide adoption grew out of the education technology conference. In the past, individual schools bought single copies of Inspiration and Kidspiration for classrooms and computer labs and the district purchased a copy for each elementary school. However, Hayward says, “We really wanted students using the software at all grade levels and across the curriculum.”
Denver Public Schools was looking for an easy, cost-effective and legally licensed way to make the visual learning software products available to all teachers and students. When Hayward learned about the Inspiration Software Comprehensive License Program, he decided that it would meet the district’s needs, offering an easy way to purchase Inspiration and Kidspiration with the confidence that all copies are properly licensed.
When the Educational Technology Department had a discussion about how to spend some Title IID money, it decided to pursue purchase of the comprehensive license from Inspiration Software. This was an exception for Denver schools, says Hayward. As a district that is managed at the buildinglevel, decisions about purchasing instructional materials are normally made by each school. In fact, Inspiration Software is Denver Public Schools’ only comprehensive instructional software license. “This is not normally something we do,” he adds.
Hayward worked with Inspiration Software to come up with a “Good Faith Estimate” of the number of instructional computers in the district—the comprehensive volume licensing program doesn’t require an exact count of computers. He was pleased to learn that the district’s current licenses for Inspiration and Kidspiration were considered when the pricing for the license was determined. Also because the comprehensive licensing program is reviewed and adjusted for new computers just once annually, Hayward only needs to place one order per year with Inspiration Software. He now saves valuable time that in the past might have been spent getting approval for and processing multiple orders throughout the school year. The district will also get special pricing on future upgrades.
“Inspiration Software worked closely with us and so it was easy to offer our teachers and students access to these valuable learning tools,” Hayward says. “We anticipate that it will be easy to manage the licenses.”
Hayward and his colleagues knew that purchasing the comprehensive license was only the first step in encouraging the use of visual learning throughout the district. The software was installed on computers throughout Denver’s 148 schools over a two-month period. With the software, teachers received a two page “Quickie” tip sheet to help them quickly learn to use Inspiration and Kidspiration.
Hayward and his team then used Inspiration Software’s professional development scripts to develop in-service training on visual learning teaching strategies. These workshops are being conducted throughout the district as requested by principals and teachers.
“With the ease of managing the Inspiration Software comprehensive license, we were able to put our time and energy into ensuring that our teachers have adequate professional development on using Inspiration and Kidspiration to support instruction,” adds Hayward.
Hayward says that because Inspiration and Kidspiration were number one on the Denver teachers’ wish list, enthusiasm for using the software in the classroom is the highest he has ever seen for a technology learning tool. Teachers in grades K-12 are using the software to support teaching and learning, and visual learning is becoming an important part of the district’s instructional program at all levels. For example, Elma Ruiz, a member of the district’s central literacy team and coordinator of the Reading First grant, says they have added Inspiration and Kidspiration to the district’s list of approved literacy software.
“We have only just begun to see the benefits. We anticipate great things as the school year progresses,” concludes Hayward.
Students across the state of New York are finding that visual learning methods help them prepare for The New York State Regents Comprehensive Examination in English. Taken during a student’s junior year, the exam (and a passing score!) is a requirement for high school graduation. Essays make up a significant portion of the test, and require students to analyze and interpret information and write clear, organized responses. Inspiration helps students prepare for the test because it helps them organize their thoughts clearly, in preparation for writing.
In Westchester County, at Walter Panas High School in Lakeland Central School District, Sue Erichsen’s students use Inspiration to prepare for the Regents exam. She created a series of graphic organizers in Inspiration to help her eleventh-grade English students compare the literary elements in the various worlds or “sivilizations” that Huck Finn experiences throughout Mark Twain’s classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
During a six-week unit, students read each chapter in the book and brainstorm about Huck’s experiences. In small groups, they create a graphic organizer depicting each of Huck’s worlds and then discuss them as a class. Linda Brandon, Lakeland CSD’s technology training coordinator, observed Erichsen’s students during one of these discussions. “The students were in groups, huddled around their diagrams. They were very engaged in discussing the assignment.” Using Inspiration to map out the literary elements helps Erichsen’s students gain a deeper understanding of the novel. In fact, about 80 percent of the students will use The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as one of the two literary works for discussion in the fourth section of the Regents exam. “To be able to write rich essays, students must get a good handle on the works they’ve read and the various literary elements that make up the work,” says Erichsen. “Creating maps of the literary elements helps the students effectively compare and contrast Huck’s various worlds.”
Erichsen uses E.W. Kemble’s illustrations from the first edition of Huckleberry Finn in her diagrams.
“The Shanty” by E.W. Kemble is used with permission from the University of Virginia library (http://etext.virginia.edu).
Erichsen uses Inspiration to help students prepare for the Regents exam, with the goal of helping them develop skills that will carry them well beyond their high school examinations. “My students will walk away from this activity, not only learning how to analyze a particular book, but also absorbing the process for learning that they can use in similar situations with success.”
In another part of New York, Sister Rosemarie Baglivio, CSJ, an English and study skills teacher at Bishop Kearney High School in Brooklyn (and a 2002 Inspired Teacher Scholarship winner), has used Inspiration for the past two years with her ninth- and tenth-grade students. Like Sue Erichsen, Sister Baglivio uses the software to prepare students for the Regents English Exam.
According to Baglivio, the biggest problems her students face in writing are poor organization and a lack of critical thinking skills. Beginning with her incoming freshman, Baglivio develops activities to help her students learn to organize and expand their thoughts. In one activity, Baglivio uses Inspiration with her ninth-grade students to analyze the characters in The Necklace and The Jewels, short stories by Guy de Maupassant. Baglivio’s students create character webs in Inspiration to analyze the main characters in the stories. After completing and discussing their character webs, students convert their webs to outlines, and expand on their ideas to write a character analysis essay.
Baglivio creates a variety of Inspiration activities to prepare students for the Regents exam. For example, one section of the exam presents students with a quote from a literary work and requires them to respond with an essay discussing the quote using two additional pieces of literature.
To practice this skill, Baglivio gives her students a quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth and asks them to write an essay discussing the quote, pulling in examples from the text. The class first discusses what makes a good essay response using the scoring rubric from the Regents exam. Baglivio then shows them how to use Inspiration to organize their essay. Her students use an Inspiration template she created to help them organize their work to develop a fuller, more focused written response.
While Inspiration helps Baglivio’s students prepare for the Regents exam, visual learning has become a larger part of their learning experiences. “They really enjoy using Inspiration to organize for writing,” says Baglivio. “Many of them have started to organize other papers in Inspiration—even when it is not required.”
When students arrive at Crossroads Center, part of the New Beginnings Educational Complex in Kissimmee, Fla., they’re sorely in need of a second chance. An alternative school in The School District of Osceola County, Crossroads serves more than 500 “at risk” students with behavioral problems in kindergarten through grade 12. They attend in lieu of expulsion from their home-zone schools. Some stay for just a semester, and others as long as two years, to get themselves back on track.
“These are kids who have never felt they could excel at anything – students who are viewed as ‘bad kids at the bad school,’” says Terri Inwood, business-education teacher of Crossroads’ middle and high school students. “My goal is to show them that they can succeed.”
It is no small feat for Inwood. She must teach her students what they need to know to pass the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) and to graduate. In addition to behavioral issues, many students at Crossroads come with language barriers and/or from low-income homes.
Inwood integrates core subjects into her business-ed curriculum, demonstrating math, reading and writing in “real world form.” The most di!cult subject for her students is writing – or at least it was until she started using Inspiration®. The essential tool to visualize, think, organize and learn, Inspiration provides powerful support for critical thinking, comprehension and writing in all curriculum areas.
Eleven years ago, Inwood taught at a school for students with severe disabilities. It was there she discovered Inspiration could help students "nd their voices in writing, and she has been “hooked” ever since. “It was a very easy way for them to put their thoughts down on paper,” she says.
When she arrived at Crossroads six years ago, she was tasked with bringing up failing writing scores on the FCAT. “My students just didn’t understand how to write, and I thought, ‘Bingo! I can teach them with Inspiration,’” she says.
With funding from two grants, Inwood secured 20 computers for her classroom and 13 more for the New Beginnings media center, which Crossroads shares with another campus. Inspiration is installed on every computer.
Inwood introduces Inspiration to her students every fall by having them write “All About Me” essays. “Inspiration gives them an enjoyable way to write—without feeling like they’re writing,” she says. She points out that the most essential skill she can teach is brainstorming. “If you can’t brainstorm, you’re never going to get it. Inspiration makes learning so easy.”
Every day for the first nine weeks of school, Inwood’s students write a new essay in preparation for the FCAT. She begins by creating a web in Inspiration, giving students a prompt and a topic, such as “What if the state of Florida mandated that students wear uniforms to school?” She asks them to type their responses in the provided symbol in the web, revise as they go and critique each other’s work.
After the FCAT is behind them, students begin a long-term project of researching and writing about a randomly selected U.S. state. “I teach them how to use the Internet properly – they learn it’s not just for games and MySpace,” says Inwood. She requires research in at least 20 different areas about their chosen state, including its capital, history, flag, bird, flower, motto, history, population, climate and economy. The students illustrate their graphic organizers with photos or graphics from the more than one million symbols available from Inspiration’s Web Resources or from the Internet. “My students put the information they find into a format they feel proud of,” she says.
Inwood’s students also use Inspiration to write about everything from famous people who have inspired them to their favorite jungle animals. Seniors at Crossroads are required to create a portfolio project, and many choose to plan it using Inspiration. Those who do, she says, typically receive A grades because they’re so well organized. “From day one when you show them how to use it, they are off and running,” she says.
With nine of the 12 teachers new to the campus this year, many of them have not yet had a chance to learn about Inspiration, so Inwood is planning a workshop to show them what the visual learning software can do. “The teachers are excited to learn about it,” she says. “We all want to use everything we have to reach these kids.”
Inwood’s students are making incredible strides. Every one of the 150 students she teaches is now earning at least the minimum passing grade of 4 out of 6 in writing on the FCAT. “These are kids who didn’t know how to write at all – who previously were at a 1 or a 2,” she says. Two of her students, including one who “hated to write,” scored 5.5 in writing on the last FCAT. Inwood gives them certificates that show their scores and encourages them to share them with their teachers when they return to their old schools. “I tell them it proves they can do it, that they are not a failure – they are a success!” she says.
Students use Inspiration to create graphic organizers illustrating the various aspects of different U.S. states, as in this one about North Carolina.
Crossroads is now ranked 16th in the state of Florida for writing and was recently recognized by the state for its gains. “Now every year we surpass our previous year’s achievements,” she says.
Inwood says she sees every day at Crossroads as an adventure, and while her days are never easy, when something good happens, she is grateful for the experience. “Kids come here feeling bad about themselves and leave here feeling good,” she says. “And Inspiration is a big part of their success.” themselves and leave here feeling good,” she says. “And Inspiration is a big part of their success.”
Incoming sixth-graders typically encounter a fair amount of anxiety about leaving the comforts of elementary school and entering the unchartered wilds of middle school. They’re leaving behind recess and a single classroom and teacher – and learning to navigate their way from class to class, use a locker and acclimate to a much larger social structure. However, at Hartford Memorial Middle School in White River Junction, VT, new sixth-graders are finding the transition is nearly painless, thanks to an innovative project.
Located in the picturesque Ottauquechee River Valley where Vermont borders New Hampshire, White River Junction is one of five “villages” in Hartford, a town of 10,200 residents. With three elementary schools, a middle school, a high school and a vocational school, Hartford School District serves 2,200 students.
Five years ago, the district’s educational technology specialist, John Minelli, and teacher Ray Hathorn developed a program in which a class of sixth-graders creates presentations revealing everything rising fifth-graders need to know about middle school. The goal is to minimize incoming students’ stress so they can succeed in their new setting right from the start, as well as to provide a monumental learning opportunity for the sixth-graders involved in the project.
The sixth-graders’ primary tool in planning and creating their presentations is Inspiration®, the essential tool to visualize, think, organize and learn. Inspiration provides powerful support for critical thinking, comprehension and writing in all curriculum areas.
“This project is way at the top of the list of the most memorable things our students have ever done at school,” said Minelli. “Everyone is busy and focused. They’re running a major transition activity, and it’s very exciting.”
Each year Minelli works with a teacher to lead a class of sixth-grade students through the project, and this year it is Tristan Kennedy, language arts and reading teacher. “We probably spend about 20 class periods to complete the project so it takes a teacher who’s really committed to it,” said Minelli.
On the first day of the school year, the sixth-graders develop graphic organizers using Inspiration, recording their fears, concerns, expectations and questions about middle school. “The reason we do this on the first day is that by four days into the school year, nothing makes them nervous anymore,” said Minelli. Students store their work in network folders until February, when they revisit it and begin to address what information would ease the transition for next year’s class.
“With this project, there is only one requirement,” explained Minelli. “They need to document everything in Inspiration, every step of the way. Inspiration is a core component of the entire project,” he said.
Armed with their data from the first day of school, Kennedy works with the class using Inspiration’s RapidFire® tool to brainstorm and map their combined data, creating a giant Inspiration graphic organizer on the whiteboard. The class then develops a list of project topics, breaking down the information into individual webs. Next, the students choose topics and divide into five groups of three to address the areas they will cover.
Typical topics include the principal and office staff, team teachers, discipline, what’s cool about middle school, and a day at middle school.
Once groups are set, “students are in complete charge of their own direction and outcome,” said Minelli. They use Inspiration to create concept maps for meeting group responsibilities and deadlines. They diagram and write interview questions, outline appointment times and determine the technology tools needed for each step.
The students are free to use the school’s digital audio recorders, cameras and a video recorder to incorporate interviews with teachers and students into their presentations. “It’s not often that a teacher will hand a 12- year-old a $500 video camera to use, but our students take great pride in this project, and nobody’s ever broken anything,” said Minelli.
Sixth-graders use Inspiration to brainstorm and capture the ideas they want to share with rising fifth-graders.
After completing their work in Inspiration, students seamlessly transfer their work to a PowerPoint presentation. Near the end of the year, they take their “show on the road” to the elementary schools. Fifthgraders see digital photos of students, staff, places and things at the middle school, accompanied by audio of staff welcoming the incoming students and explaining their roles.
“The students are excited to tell the fifth-graders about all kinds of things – the dances, the snack bar, discipline, the loss of recess and the social aspects of middle school,” said Minelli.
In previous years, the transition was limited to a question-and-answer session at each elementary school and a brief tour of the middle school, conducted by guidance counselors. The fifth-graders are very receptive to the new student-directed approach, said Minelli. “They’re more relaxed and more apt to ask questions that they might not ask adults, such as what happens when you don’t do your homework.”
While the incoming middle school students are reaping the rewards of this project, so are the sixth-graders who participate in it, said Minelli. “There’s a huge level of satisfaction in creating a product they are really proud of.” In addition, this project teaches the sixth-graders problem-solving skills they will need down the road—in college and in the work force, he said.
Minelli said Hartford School District’s use of Inspiration extends far beyond the middle school transition project, and is particularly useful for the secondary students’ development of writing portfolios. “It is really seamless, and it’s the most intuitive product I have ever seen,” he said. “Inspiration is as easy as can be to use, and our students are accomplishing amazing things with it.”
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Webspiration Classroom® Case Studies [2]
Successful Pilot of Web-Based Writing and Visual Thinking Tool Leads to
Schoolwide Adoption
In Cathy Lazas’ special-education classes, many of her students are reluctant learners, and writing, more than any other subject, is often “very, very challenging,” said the Warren Middle School teacher from Warren Township Public Schools in New Jersey. “The way we traditionally ask students to write can feel like torture to them.”
Last year, the district participated in a pilot of Inspiration Software’s latest offering, Webspiration Classroom™, the online writing, visual thinking and collaboration tool for students and teachers. Webspiration Classroom provides anytime, anywhere access to a learning environment where students brainstorm ideas, gather and organize information, build understanding, and develop written essays, papers and reports – increasing student achievement in language arts and across the curriculum.
“We had great success with Webspiration Classroom – it ties into students’ strengths and learning styles,” said Lazas, who teaches sixth- and eighth-grade language arts and social studies in both pullout-replacement and general-education classes. One student who was particularly apprehensive about writing created a complete, organized book report using Webspiration Classroom. “It was probably more than I’ve seen him write in all the time he’s been at our school.”
Faye Brady, Ed.D., the district’s director of Special Services, spearheaded the pilot of Webspiration Classroom, because she saw the potential for students with the support from assistive technology. “Many of our students have good thoughts, but they can’t organize them. Webspiration Classroom enables them to put order to their ideas. The work I’ve read from them is vastly different from what I’ve seen them do with paper and pencil,” she said.
Consultant Brian S. Friedlander, Ph.D., who worked with the district’s Assistive Technology Team on the Webspiration Classroom pilot, said it was an unmitigated success. “Everyone was invigorated, to see how it could be applied to kids with a wide range of abilities,” he said.
After a short training with teachers and work with the district’s Assistive Technology Team, Friedlander modeled working with Webspiration Classroom with students in the classroom. Beforehand, the teachers prepared him for some of the classroom dynamics he could anticipate. “But those things didn’t happen, and students were engaged and on task, which took the teachers by surprise. It changed their perspective about their students,” he said.
Brady said, across the board, the educators and students involved in the pilot were positive about the experience. “Webspiration Classroom is a wonderful tool for building 21st century skills – creativity, collaboration and communication. And the results we’ve seen are particularly impressive since we only piloted it near the end of the school year.” Since the pilot, excitement built about its success and how quickly it can impact student performance, which led to a schoolwide adoption at Warren Middle School beginning with the 2011-2012 school year.
Brady said bringing the visual learning solution into the classroom – rather than into a computer lab – with teachers as the key facilitators contributed to the successful pilot. She sees the teacher-student interaction via the online collaboration tools as key to successful learning and believes it will help teachers integrate subjects across the curriculum. “Webspiration Classroom is connecting teachers and students. We have lots of hopes and dreams for it,” she said.
In Lazas’ classroom, she has seen how the visual learning tool has improved both effectiveness and efficiency in teaching and learning. When leading a discussion about the plot of a book, she had her students use Webspiration Classroom to map the sequence of events. Some students constructed a timeline, while others plotted with triangles. “They were able to visualize the storyline, which vastly improved their comprehension,” she said.
When preparing her students for an upcoming state assessment, she used it to illustrate what topics may be covered. “It was a great way to show them samples of the types of questions that may be on the test,” she said.
While using Webspiration Classroom’s collaboration tools for peer review, students are gaining thinking and writing skills, as well as seeing the benefits of working in pairs and in groups, she said. “They have a great time working together, submitting their documents back and forth, and helping each other organize their work. It’s very motivating.”
Like Brady, Lazas has seen a striking difference in the quality of work she receives from students when they’re learning with Webspiration Classroom. “I know that if I gave my students the same assignment with paper and pencil, the end product would be significantly less. With Webspiration Classroom, they’re inspired to do more,” she said.
Lazas’ colleague, seventh-grade language arts teacher Donna Bardy, used Webspiration Classroom to teach vocabulary and to help her students brainstorm writing ideas, organize and write book reports and create study guides. “The possibilities are endless,” she said.
Webspiration Classroom helped her students find success in writing, in a much more pleasant way than with paper and pencil, she said. “They absolutely love it – they don’t feel like they’re working when they’re using it.”
As many of her students have poor handwriting, they take pride in the neat, legible work they can create with Webspiration Classroom, she said. When they create a study guide, they have a clear, clean reference tool that they can print, which clarifies the information they are learning and improves their ability to understand and recall it.
Bardy, too, found that her students were more engaged and put in more effort than they would have without Webspiration Classroom. “Some were very creative,” she said. “They went home and applied what they had learned on their own.”
Because Webspiration Classroom is accessible from anywhere, Bardy also assigned her students homework with it – which they found much more appealing than traditional homework. When questions arose, they sent her notes. “I was able to give them feedback before they completed their projects, which helped continue the learning process after school,” she said.
District technology coordinator Mary Ellen Roberts said implementing Webspiration Classroom was a snap. “The fact that this is web-based is very appealing, because we do not have the resources to bring in more tech people to spend hours and hours loading software or updates,” she said. “Implementation was straightforward and fast.”
Consultant Friedlander concluded, “Webspiration Classroom made a huge difference in engagement, as well as retention of the material they learned. It’s amazing to see what students can accomplish with the right tool,” he said.
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With $25,000 to spend and InspireData® at their fingertips, 18 sixth-grade math students in Pennsylvania learned the ups and downs of investing in the stock market while building data analysis and math skills.
These students at Ancillae-Assumpta Academy, a preK-8 Catholic school outside of Philadelphia, used their money to buy shares of Juicy Couture, McDonald’s, Nike and Coca-Cola, just to name a few. The money wasn’t real, but that didn’t matter as they learned how to track their investments and use diagrams and graphs to understand data.
Technology coordinator Melinda O’Neill and math teacher Jeanne Hisey used the stock market lesson as a way to teach a state standard on graphing. To make the project come alive, they used InspireData, the visual way to explore and understand data from Inspiration® Software, Inc. With InspireData, students investigate, analyze and interpret data and information in dynamic graphs and charts. InspireData tools make it easy to change variables and plot types so students can explore data in multiple, meaningful ways. This encourages them to investigate data analytically, ask more questions and apply their understanding of the data to form better conclusions and to continue exploration.
Creating pie charts allowed the students to see the total dollar amount spent on each individual stock, as well as the percentage of students who had chosen that particular stock.
“InspireData worked really, really well, and I am so hyped about it,” said O’Neill. “It’s really kid-friendly—very intuitive. They just figured it out as they went and got the hang of it very quickly.”
Using InspireData, Ancillar-Assumpta Academy students created graphs and diagrams to track their investments, see real live results and analyze the data. This InspireData graph was used to analyze stock prices over various date ranges.
The reason for choosing a project that involved capturing live data was two-fold, she said. She wanted the lesson to be meaningful to students, and she was testing InspireData to see if it would be an effective tool for the upcoming science fair, where using live data is critical.
Hisey liked the real-world application of the project. "My strong belief is that when teaching math, we need to show students how it can be used in their daily lives," she said. "This was a fun project because they were able to pick stocks that interested them while they learned about economics and finance."
The students went right to work with InspireData, creating a database that included the purchase price of the stocks, numbers of shares and amount of money spent. Next, they turned the data into pie graphs that showed their stocks and the proportional quantity of each. In the Notes tool in InspireData, they wrote why they picked particular stocks. “Truthfully, no one knew why. They just chose what they liked, and they had some crazy picks,” said O'Neill.
Some students allotted exactly one-third of their $25,000 to each stock, while others put 50 percent of it on one stock and 25 percent on the other two, and some chose completely random amounts—all visible on their pie charts, she said. Because none of the purchases added up to exactly $25,000, the students placed leftover funds in money market accounts and monitored them as well.
Students made bar charts to document live data that they would input each Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Over a three-week period, the students monitored their investments, entering the day’s closing price on each of their stocks.
Next, the students created line graphs, with three lines revealing how their stocks changed over the three weeks. “The students could see in living color how each stock was changing, looking at price over time,” said O’Neill. “They could see how the market fluctuates.” At the end of the three weeks, O’Neill created bar graph data at the classroom level of all the students’ investments and turned it over to them to manipulate the data. “They graphed it by student to see who had the highest gains and losses, and it prompted a discussion about making wise investments,” she said. The students were impressed with the choices of one student, who made the greatest financial gain, and they asked him how he chose his stocks. “He said his dad chose them.”
This project, she said, fit easily into class each day. “It’s not like a lot of projects where teachers don’t have the time to take them on.” O’Neill plans to expand the stock market project to all four sixth-grade math classes, and she believes it will be a strong lesson for students at all ability levels.
Now with school-wide access to InspireData at Ancillae-Assumpta Academy, students will be ready when it’s time for the science fair. “In the past, students have had a hard time applying their science fair data into relevant line and bar graphs,” she said. In addition, O’Neill plans to use InspireData with the fifth- and sixth-grade social studies classes to study population changes. “They’ll love InspireData – it’s just so clear, and they can do so much with it,” she said.
Hisey agreed, noting that visual learning helps students build understanding. “Without InspireData, we would have been building graphs by hand, which is very time-consuming. What the students produced was so impressive. When they were done, they had something they were very proud of.”
The stack plot added up the total dollar amount of earnings for each student, based on their choice of stock purchase.
Telannia Norfar’s students were so engrossed in a recent project—collecting and analyzing data to improve the quality and selection of food in their school cafeteria—that their class time would vanish long before they were ready for it to be over. To accommodate the students, Norfar and her colleagues opened their classrooms to them at the end of the day, so they could continue their work.
“They loved this project,” said Norfar, a ninth-grade math teacher at Northwest Classen High School in Oklahoma City. “Even the students who were not usually motivated to learn were excited about it.”
Throughout the project, from collecting data to analyzing the results, the students used InspireData®, the visual way to explore and understand data from Inspiration Software®. With InspireData, students build critical data literacy skills as they actively explore and analyze data using dynamic Venn diagrams and bar, stack, pie and axis plots to interpret information and draw conclusions.
Norfar team-teaches in a “ninth-grade academy” at Northwest Classen, a school with a diverse study body of 1,300. The cafeteria-food project was a collaborative effort with her colleagues across the curriculum. Norfar’s focus was on math, as she guided students in analyzing the data they had gathered using InspireData. In English class, the students worked on writing skills, as they wrote business letters to the principal and the cafeteria manager. From their social studies teacher, the students learned about other cultures, including the geography and cuisine of different regions. And they worked with their science teacher to create lab reports about the patterns they saw in their data and to learn about environmental considerations in the cafeteria.
“Project-based learning is very beneficial because students are able to see how everything is related,” explained Norfar. “Maybe they are doing math, but they are using English, science and social studies, too.”
Norfar’s students had a vested interest in the project because it was tangible—it would likely change their school dining experience. Each year, district administrators sign a one-year contract with a food service provider, and they agreed to consider the students’ findings when choosing the next provider. To kick off the planning, Norfar had her students use Inspiration®, the visual learning tool, to build concept maps. “With Inspiration, students can analyze their planning process graphically, and it helps them to think logically,” she said.
Using InspireData, Northwest Classen High School students created pie graphs and other plots to analyze data they collected about fellow students’ eating preferences. Their data analysis helped cafeteria staff create menus that were more appealing to students.
Next, the students divided into groups to create a survey that would be conducted school-wide, using the e-Survey feature of InspireData. Each team wrote three questions, and the students ensured that the answer options spanned the tastes of a variety of cultures. “I love the e-Survey capabilities of InspireData—that’s my favorite part,” said Norfar.
The survey included questions about numerous aspects of food service, including types of cuisine and portion sizes, as well as the accommodations in the cafeteria. Would students prefer to hear music, and if so, what kind? In addition, with a school remodel right around the corner, Norfar’s students even included questions about the color and configuration of the cafeteria. Students school-wide had the opportunity to take the survey during English class. With 240 valid responses received, Norfar’s students set out to analyze the data. “They were so happy they could go into InspireData to tabulate,” she said. She had previously assigned her students an exercise in analyzing data manually “so they would appreciate how technology can help them with this task, and they certainly did.”
Creating different plots using InspireData made it easy for Norfar’s students to interpret information and draw conclusions.
Using InspireData, the class built Venn diagrams and saw which groups overlapped in their choices. They analyzed data in tables, bar graphs and pie graphs and broke down responses by gender. Norfar designated class time on Tuesdays and Thursdays to analyze data as a group, “and these were their favorite times of the week,” she said.
“Students really got into the updates and graphs. I helped them figure out the right way to click, and they took it and ran. This was the highlight of the entire project to me: getting students to understand and use technology to analyze data for themselves and by themselves,” said Norfar.
As a self-described “tech junkie,” Norfar regularly uses blogs, movies, podcasts, “nings” (online platforms for creating social websites and networks) and “wikis” (Web pages that anyone can edit) in her class projects. On the cafeteria-food project, she created a “collaboration center” on the Internet—one where students could find answers to their questions and participate in online discussions about the project. There, they could find examples of any of the components in their project, such as a business proposal or a type of graph, or see the grading rubrics for each piece of the project. She also kept a blog, where she posted updates and video images of some of her students working on the project.
Research outside of their school was part of the project as well. Students investigated what other districts were serving, compared food costs and studied nutrition. Sampling healthy foods relevant to the cultures of the student population was also part of their research. Students tasted fried tofu, edamame, guacamole, brown rice and tabouli. And, they interviewed the school cafeteria manager and principal. “They even considered bringing in catering or building a garden at school,” said Norfar.
Before the project was even complete, the cafeteria manager was asking for data, so Norfar shared the InspireData graphs of the responses. Shortly after that, students began seeing a cafeteria menu that was more closely aligned with their tastes. “This was great news,” said Norfar. “The students actually got to see that what they do can make a difference.”
After the students completed their research and analyzed their data in InspireData, they used their conclusions to create a proposal for their school’s new cafeteria menu. That recommendation is now in administrators’ hands.
Norfar plans to embark on similar projects next school year, because she has seen great value in using InspireData to engage students in understanding how to collect and analyze data in various ways.
“My students use a whole lot of interesting tools when they come to my class, but there are only a few products they are excited about, and InspireData is definitely one of them,” said Norfar. “InspireData really allows them to manipulate and analyze data. I love it. I think every teacher should use it.”
The last couple of years have been a time of upheaval for students and faculty at Slidell High School, located in the New Orleans suburb of St. Tammany Parish. When Hurricane Katrina ripped though the region, many who had lost their homes left the area, and students from the other side of Lake Pontchartrain, whose schools had been destroyed, joined Slidell.
The school’s enrollment, now at 1,700, is slightly lower than it was pre-Katrina, in this district of 35,000 students and 52 schools—many still reeling from the damage. Slidell High School, a historic institution erected in 1908, was largely spared by Katrina, and with the work of teachers such as Glenda Schmidt, innovation in teaching continues.
Last fall, Schmidt, a science teacher, was tasked with adding earth sciences to the curriculum to meet district exit exam criteria. After reading on a science Web site about a project called “Mapping the Air in Your School,” she decided to put it to the test with all of her Chemistry I Honors classes.
This project fit well with her curriculum, as she was about to launch a unit on gases. She had recently learned about InspireData®, the visual way to explore and understand data, and thought it might just be what she needed to bring the project to life. InspireData builds critical data literacy skills and engages students. Students actively explore and analyze data using dynamic Venn diagrams and bar, stack, pie and axis plots to interpret information and draw conclusions. Already a fan of Inspiration® visual learning software, she said she “knew InspireData would be good.”
“My students were very excited and curious, and they really latched on to InspireData,” said Schmidt. “I didn’t have to instruct them on it all; the only thing I had to explain was lab techniques.” Her second-period class filmed the project. “I like new projects, and this one really grew,” she said.
Relative humidity was interesting to measure and discuss “because it’s kind of a nebulous thing about feeling comfortable,” said Schmidt. She divided her students into groups: One group read background information she had collected, one formed questions to create a survey, another input data into InspireData, and yet another learned how to use the lab materials: a data-collection device, digital temperature probes and graphing calculators.
On a cold day in December, her students took measurements in various rooms around the school. “A number of teachers asked to have their room temperatures measured, but we couldn’t do them all,” she said. Students used two digital temperature probes: one wet, with the end covered with a shoelace and dipped in water before each reading, and one dry. Students connected both to the data-collection device and the graphing calculator, which recorded the temperatures to determine relative humidity. Next, using InspireData, they analyzed the data.
During her second-period class alone, students collected data !lling a table 35 columns wide and 136 rows long. “The students were extremely involved in the collection and interpretation, even volunteering extra time outside of class to enter the data into InspireData,” she said.
“We expected the older rooms in the !rst wing, with window heating units, to be draftier and colder, but these rooms turned out to be the hottest rooms in the school,” said Schmidt. Another prediction was that if the temperature increases, so does the relative humidity. However, the hottest rooms in the !rst wing also had the lowest relative humidity. “Everyone had ideas about humidity, and their attempts to explain the results interested me the most,” she said.
InspireData has many valuable capabilities, she said, noting that it separates the data for students so they can clearly visualize the data and see what happened. Perhaps Schmidt’s favorite feature is the ability to make slides with live data, she said. “You can click on any axis and change any variable, and it’s still live. The little icons, representing each data point, move across the screen to their new spot, which everyone !nds interesting and amusing.”
The speed is another bonus, as data plots are instantaneous. “It is fascinating to watch. It keeps up with how students think,” she said. “In today’s world, with all the electronics kids use every day, you have to have something that moves fast, and this is it. You don’t have to be bogged down to plot something and see a relationship. For them to see and watch the graph form before their eyes is extremely powerful.”
Schmidt also appreciates the color coding, which she said makes the data very easy to see. In the project, students saw the lowest relative humidity in blue. “The results were not what we expected, and by putting the color coding on it, it really blew their minds.” Being able to plot text was a plus, too, she said. “InspireData gave us the ability to ask questions and answers, so we were not limited to numbers.”
InspireData also allows students to predict the outcome of their project, something Schmidt sees as a powerful teaching tool. “When we were making predictions, it really struck me that this can do for graphical analysis what word processing lets you do with words. You can rearrange and clarify.”
Schmidt said as she has used InspireData, she has become more aware of “how "exible, powerful and interactive this program actually is. Because it yields changes in visible results so quickly, it facilitates more questions and much more critical thinking.” Another teacher at Slidell had planned to use a spreadsheet program to do his scienti!c analysis until Schmidt showed him what InspireData could do, she said, and then he added it to his project as well.
Thinking ahead for next school year, Schmidt is planning more innovative science projects using InspireData, including repeating the relative humidity project. She is looking forward to teaching Slidell’s 100th class and believes the centennial festivities will bring the school a much-needed lift.
As she and the community around her make strides in recovering from the devastation of Katrina, Schmidt finds joy in following her passion: teaching kids about the science behind the world that surrounds them. “It’s exciting to see my students on the edge of their seats, wanting to know about science,” she said. “They’re working together, asking great questions and really learning. They are amazing.”
Students collected data in InspireData’s Table View and then chose an axis plot to show the correlation between a room’s temperature, relative humidity, and whether or not it had a window heating unit.
At Groves Academy in St. Louis Park, Minn., juniorsand seniors in Will Bohrnsen’s project-based science classes receive hands-on experience in data collection and analysis. Bohrnsen’s students—who face various learning difficulties—often struggle with the abilities to manage projects and organize data to make meaningful analyses. Recipient of the Inspired Teacher Scholarship Best Project Award for InspireData®, Bohrnsen was thrilled to discover InspireData last fall and immediately introduced it to his students. With InspireData, his students learned to organize their data into tables and explore the integrated plots to solve problems and draw conclusions.
Bohrnsen’s students completed several projects last fall that required the collection of detailed observations and measurements, followed by careful analysis of the gathered data. In one project, students collected water samples from several nearby lakes and streams to compare water quality and discover how the water quality a"ected invertebrate life. Students worked with scientists from the local Minnehaha Creek Watershed District to learn the correct way to collect water samples. Standard chemistry kits were employed by students to test various attributes of water quality. Students used keys and guides to identify the aquatic invertebrates found in each sample.
A second group of students chose to compare diversity among invertebrates found in the leaf litter of deciduous and evergreen forests. Students visited local parks and worked with state park rangers to gather invertebrate samples using a complicated extraction device. After dissecting the samples, students sorted by class and order.
Once data collection was complete, both groups of students entered their data into tables in InspireData and switched to Plot View to analyze the results. Stack and Venn plots were used to compare and interpret the data. “The kids could immediately see correlations that were impossible to visualize prior to using InspireData,” says Bohrnsen. “By using InspireData, both groups of students were able to quickly and intuitively set up data charts, input factors and create visual plots that were easy to manipulate, evaluate and reproduce.”
Students used the tables and plots from InspireData to create posters representing the results of their study. The posters were displayed in the school, an area nature center and visitor centers for the city and state parks divisions.
Bohrnsen’s students are currently in the midst of a project that uses InspireData’s Time Series features to track several timed experiments. One group of students is creating a classic mouse maze to compare maze completion times of a control group of mice to an experimental group. Students will test the experimental group to determine if negative noise reinforcement will lead the mice more quickly through the maze. Each time an experimental mouse makes a wrong turn, students will make loud noises until the mouse chooses the correct path.
A second group of students is building a fish maze, using food to train fish to swim through a series of plates with colored holes in them. Once fish can complete the maze on their own, students will move the plates around and test the time it takes for the fish to find their way through the maze using only the colored holes. Students will enter results into InspireData using tables set up as series and analyze the data in Plot View with InspireData’s Time Series animation.
Bohrnsen plans to use InspireData throughout his science classes and hopes to introduce the software to other faculty for use across the curriculum. “Graphically, visually and intuitively, InspireData makes sense for my students,” says Bohrnsen. “It is easy for students to get their data organized and to transfer between different ways of viewing information.”
Will Bohrnsen’s high school science students used InspireData™ to investigate correlations between water quality and diversity of invertebrate life.
Middle school science teacher Richard Comeau has a strategy for keeping his sixth-graders involved in their class work and motivated to find answers to their inquiries. His hands-on physical and earth science courses at William Diamond Middle School in Lexington, Mass., reflect his involvement in scientific endeavors outside the classroom by including extensive data collection and analysis. Through guided discussions, students drive their own inquiry and process of analysis. Comeau uses InspireData® as a tool to encourage students to form their own questions, collect data, analyze results and make inferences to acquire a deeper understanding of science concepts.
Richard Comeau’s inquiry-based classroom and hands-on science activities encourage students to arrive at their own understanding of concepts.
Every year, Comeau's students participate in an extended project to learn what it is like to design and conduct a controlled experiment to discover the effects of salt on plant growth. InspireData plays a key role in helping students critically examine different data sets and make valid conclusions.
To begin, students grow their own plants known as Wisconsin Fast Plants (Brassica rapa)—a genetically engineered plant from the crucifer family that completes its entire life cycle in about 40 days. Each student cares for six plants: two plants receive regular tap water, two receive a low-sodium water solution, and the final two are watered with a high-sodium solution. Students use color-coded water bottles and plant trays, together with growing carts and adjustable-height lamps, to avoid errors and control variables.
Students track the growth of each plant, recording plant height, number of leaves, number of flowers, seed pod count and seed pod mass. “My kids get really excited and take great ownership of their plants and the data they collect,” says Comeau.
Following completion of the plants' life cycle, students enter their data into an InspireData table and complete a series of exercises to gain an understanding of the graphing process and familiarity with the results of their own experiment. Then, Comeau introduces the concept of large sample size. He aggregates each student’s InspireData table into one class data set, setting up the table in a multi-series format so that students can compare their own results to the rest of the class and observe changes in the data over time.
After students enter data from their plant growth experiment, Comeau combines the data into one class data set in InspireData.
Students then switch to InspireData’s Plot View to analyze growth and compare individual results with the class data. Ultimately, each student is able to track their plants in each salt group within the largest sample size of 170 plants in each group.
Using InspireData’s Time Series animation, students can watch how plant growth changes over time and compare results of treatments.
Using InspireData’s Time Series animation, students can track plant height over time with an axis plot and watch as the data moves, showing daily growth. Students can also use other plot types—Venn, pie and stack plots—to compare growth indicators, such as number of leaves, flowers and seed pods. Using the class data set, students draw conclusions about the overall effects of salt on plant growth. “InspireData is "uid and visually engaging. It allows more kids with diverse learning styles to make sense of the data,” says Comeau. “Kids want to work with the data because they have so much control over how they represent the information and make sense of it—and they can do it quickly and easily.”
Comeau also uses InspireData outside the classroom for research and analysis. Last summer, Comeau had the unique opportunity to hone his data analysis skills in a private-industry externship through a Massachusetts Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) initiative. He spent five weeks at the Mount Washington Observatory, a private, non-profit weather station in New Hampshire. Home to some of the world’s worst weather—150+ mph wind storms and temperatures far below freezing—the observatory collects and analyzes data with a mission to advance understanding of the natural systems that create the Earth’s weather and climate.
Comeau’s task was to analyze data collected from five temperature sensors run by solar-powered batteries located at various elevations on the mountain. The observatory had received a grant to connect additional probes measuring soil temperature, relative humidity and ozone at each site, but scientists were concerned that the batteries were not maintaining the minimum voltage requirements needed to sustain the probes. Since Mt. Washington’s extreme weather would prohibit the scientists from making regular visits to each site, the observatory looked to Comeau to investigate why the batteries were not adequate and recommend how to improve each site. InspireData provided him with just the right tool to compile and analyze the data that had been collected over the past 18 months and to enable Comeau to draw accurate conclusions. “I knew all along that I was going to use InspireData for my fellowship to do meaningful work,” recalls Comeau.
While working at a weather observatory on a summer fellowship, Comeau used InspireData to analyze and present conclusions drawn from large amounts of data to demonstrate how scientists could improve the observatory’s solar-powered, data-collection devices.
Comeau organized the data, which included dates, elevation measurements, voltage readings and sunlight minutes, into several different types of tables in InspireData to !nd the best method of analyzing the readings and drawing conclusions. He created various plots depicting differences in voltage readings between elevations, seasonal range of sunlight minutes and the voltage variations during different seasons. Other InspireData tools, such as box-and-whisker plots and count computations, provided additional useful information to support his analysis.
Comeau then studied the results of his data analysis in InspireData in combination with site-specifc issues and extensive research on solar panels, sun azimuth and vertical altitude. As a result, he was able to recommend how and when to adjust the solar panels relative to the ground and the horizon to enable each solar panel to collect enough sunlight to sustain the additional probes. His five weeks of analysis culminated in a presentation to the observatory staff, using InspireData’s Slide Show tool to capture the sequence of data analysis and present the live data. “It was wonderful to show scientists at the observatory what InspireData could do,” says Comeau. “When I showed the changes over time using the animated time series controls and then exploded the data to show battery voltage changes at each of the sites over the 18 months, that got eyebrows! The scientists appreciated being able to look at the data from so many different angles.”
When Comeau returned to the classroom, he showed students his work in InspireData and discussed how his data analysis had challenged assumptions and enabled authentic, meaningful conclusions. He plans to use InspireData for a classroom project that gets students involved in collecting and comparing local weather data to Mt. Washington’s. “InspireData is my go-to software,” says Comeau. “It is important to get kids to think critically. The construction of knowledge and the corrections of misconceptions take place over time. Powerful learning and deep understanding happen when kids have a chance to make sense of their own data and arrive at their own ‘ah-hahs.’”
InspireData’s Time Series animation helped Comeau to give scientists a clear picture of the problems and to support his recommendations for improvements.
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[2] Kidspiration [2]® C [2]ase Studies [2]
Living by the adage, “Good tools do not make a good teacher, but a good teacher makes good use of tools,” instructional technology specialist Elizabeth Benno spends her days integrating the best technology solutions into instruction at Puster Elementary School, part of Lovejoy Independent School District, located outside of Dallas. A hands-down favorite tool at her school is Kidspiration®, the visual way to explore and understand words, numbers, and concepts, from Inspiration® Software, Inc.
Created specifically for K-5 learners, Kidspiration develops thinking, literacy and numeracy skills using proven visual learning principles. By combining pictures, words, and sounds, students strengthen word recognition, vocabulary, comprehension and written expression. With visual math tools, students build reasoning and problem-solving skills.
Last school year, Benno instituted a “Technology Week,” where she spent the entire week in one classroom, incorporating technology into instruction at every possible opportunity. Her goal was to give teachers the skills and confidence to make use of technology all year long. Sarah Pittenger, a kindergarten teacher, was the first to participate. “We sat down with my normal lesson plan and looked at how we could make it better with technology,” she explained.
They were off and running with numerous Kidspiration projects – both whole-class assignments illuminated on an interactive whiteboard and individual ones completed during stations on the five computers in the classroom. “It was so easy for everyone to visualize the lessons with Kidspiration,” said Pittenger. “Kidspiration was definitely a large part of our week.”
Describing herself as a “technology learner,” Pittenger said she volunteered to participate in Technology Week because she wanted to increase her technology knowledge and make a routine of using it more frequently. With a year of using Kidspiration previously under her belt, she was already accustomed to reaching for it, she said, but now she sees even more ways it can support instruction in her kindergarten classroom.
After Technology Week, Pittenger now integrates Kidspiration into nearly every science or social studies lesson she teaches, because she finds the visual connections help her students learn more effectively. “My students are very comfortable using Kidspiration. They just love it, and they’re building important skills with it,” she said.
Pittenger now uses Kidspiration extensively to teach her students about animals and their habitats, sorting animals that emerge in the day from those that come out at night, and studying animal body parts and how animals move. In addition, she says Kidspiration is great for sorting U.S. and Texas symbols, teaching the four seasons and the five senses, and showing the life cycle of a ladybug.
As part of a science lesson, Pittenger took her students to a neighboring preschool, where they learned about composting and saw how food scraps turn into a rich fertilizer. When they returned to their classroom, they made webs in Kidspiration to display what can and cannot go in a compost bin. “They were inspired to compost, and making the webs helped reinforce what they had learned,” she said. “One amusing thing they listed on the ‘cannot compost’ list was a cat, because they had seen a cat wandering around there.”
Pittenger plans to expand her use of Kidspiration with additional language arts lessons, adding more writing activities, dictionary lessons and word-family sorts. “Kidspiration always captures their attention; it makes sense to use it whenever I can,” she said.
As Puster Elementary ramps up its use of technology, Benno – the instructional technology specialist – works closely with teachers to build their skills. In the past, teachers would drop their students off in the computer lab, but now they stay, she said.
Benno frequently builds activity templates for teachers, but also points them to the ready-made templates that come with Kidspiration, as well as those created by other educators at their school and those on Inspiration Software’s Web site. “When I provide someone with a template, I often hear, ‘This is exactly what I needed,’” she said.
Benno finds that Kidspiration is the perfect tool for word sorting, matching words to pictures and sorting vowel patterns. She also finds it useful for young readers to learn the parts of speech and to map stories. One favorite project is using a Venn diagram to compare the original “Gingerbread Man” story with the contemporary “Gingerbread Baby.” She also employs the Venn diagram when fourth graders are studying explorers; students choose two from a bank of explorers and compare their lives.
When second graders were learning the difference between rural, suburban and urban, Benno created a template to show themselves, their neighborhood and their city – an assignment they accomplished as a class. “One of the students said, ‘You forgot some,’ and the class took it further, adding their county, their state and so forth. It’s great to see the enthusiasm when they work with Kidspiration,” she said.
For the fifth graders, Benno uses Kidspiration to help them organize research projects, including one on biomes and another on regions in the United States. “It’s a wonderful research tool that helps guide their thinking,” she said.
With Kidspiration’s comprehensive symbol library, Benno said she is sometimes surprised by how much is available. When a third-grade teacher wanted her students to draw cartoon strips to include in a newspaper they were creating, Benno found a template, and the students were able to draw them with the symbol maker tool. “That was really fun,” she said.
From kindergartners to fifth graders, students gravitate toward Kidspiration, she said. At a recent open house, students were showing their families around the school, and nearly all of them who came into the computer lab wanted to demonstrate how they use Kidspiration. “They can’t wait to get on it,” she said. “It’s so easy and fun to use.”
With the support of a principal who encourages creativity and provides innovative technology tools such as Kidspiration, Benno is excited to see how teaching and learning will evolve at Puster Elementary. “With Kidspiration, literally, you can do something in five to 10 minutes that’s really beneficial,” she said. “It’s just a great, great tool, and we’re only scratching the surface of what we can do with it.”
Few students in Melinda Leitner’s classrooms share a common native language, as they come from countries around the globe, speaking a colorful array of languages—Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Arabic, Hindi, Russian and several others, including African dialects that do not have a written form. Leitner, an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher, travels among three demographically different elementary schools in Henrico County Public Schools, located in suburban Richmond, Va., working with students in kindergarten through grade 5 with widely varying levels of English language proficiency. For the past six years, she’s been relying on Kidspiration®, the visual way to explore and understand words, numbers and concepts, from Inspiration® Software, Inc., to help her students build English language skills across the curriculum.
“My students learn English through the content, and Kidspiration makes it very visual and hands-on for them,” said Leitner. “I might have a group of level-one students—beginning English speakers—with a kindergartner, a couple of third graders and a fifth grader. And even though everyone is learning different content, they are all on computers using Kidspiration, working side by side.”
Designed specifically for early learners in kindergarten through fifth grade, Kidspiration develops thinking and literacy skills using proven visual learning principles. In reading and writing, Kidspiration strengthens word recognition, vocabulary, comprehension and written expression.
Henrico County’s ESL students spend the majority of their days in class with native English speakers, and when Leitner works with them in ESL, she revisits much of the same content, to reinforce what they’ve learned. “Social English,” which students use on the playground, comes quickly, but reading, writing and understanding “academic English” takes time, she explained.
During a geography lesson, Leitner’s students used a template she created in Kidspiration to make written and visual notes about regions in Virginia.
“Kidspiration allows students to learn the academic English in a fun way. It’s not a worksheet or a textbook, but rather something they can manipulate, print out and take home as their study guide.”
As with all students in the state, ESL students must pass the state assessment, the Virginia Standards of Learning. And whether Leitner is teaching fourth graders about the regions of Virginia or second graders about famous Americans, she often uses Kidspiration. “They may not have the language skills to express it, but with Kidspiration, they can show that they understand the content. And when they go back to the classroom, they are better equipped to find the words to explain what they know.”
Leitner works with groups of up to five students at a time, in a setting where they feel comfortable speaking up—something many are hesitant to do among their native-English-speaking peers in the regular classroom. She encourages group discussions to develop language skills, and she uses Kidspiration for that, as well. “When they point at a picture on the screen, they’re able to show me what they’re thinking, and the words flow more easily,” she said. “They don’t clam up, because they have the visual to help convey what they mean.”
Whether she is pulling from Kidspiration’s vast selection of ready-to-use templates or creating her own, Leitner finds uses for Kidspiration every day—in social studies, science, math and language arts—from teaching basic skills to communicating complex concepts.
For students who haven’t mastered phonetic sounds, especially those who speak languages with no written representation, she has them do a letter sort on Kidspiration. And with Kidspiration’s Listen tool, students hear words read aloud, which strengthens word recognition and comprehension. “They enjoy the voice,” she said. For example, if a student is looking at a picture of the Statue of Liberty, he can slide the cursor over it and hear the words over and over while reading them, until he fully understands the three separate words that make up the monument’s name.
As Virginia “is a big history state,” Leitner has put Kidspiration to work teaching a wide variety of social studies topics. In science, she teaches the elements, plant and animal cells, closed- and open-circuit electricity, and weather patterns. She also uses Kidspiration to teach the language of math, including “equal to,” “less than” and “more than.” Leitner appreciates the ease with which her students can build a diagram, add visual elements and then click to transform it into a written format. “It’s easy to add other elements to anything you create,” she said. “And my students are proud of what they make—they definitely enjoy taking home their finished work.”
Leitner’s students used this Kidspiration template to record, classify, and sort ideas and visual cues during a science lesson.
Students are particularly fond of Kidspiration’s well-stocked library of clip art, she said, as well as the ability to add their own images. “It’s colorful, and it captures their attention. What kid wouldn’t like learning this way?” she asked.
Sometimes words can only be learned through visuals because they’re nearly impossible to describe otherwise, and Kidspiration is the key to Leitner’s students’ understanding, she said. Eels or barnacles, for example, are strange words for ESL students to learn, because they’re not creatures they see very often, she explained. She has her students use Kidspiration to pull up pictures of them, write about them and create colorful diagrams. When other subjects, such as holidays, cause confusion, she has students create picture sentences about them, adding words under the pictures to explain the meaning.
Leitner considers Kidspiration a vital part of the learning process for her students and sees “an unlimited number of ways you can use it,” she said. “I use it to supplement what I teach, and we always have fun with it. With Kidspiration, my students take what they’re taught, and they reach.”
At Fairview Elementary School in Lake Charles, La., first-grade teacher Jennifer Frederick is dedicated to helping her students achieve in the face of the obstacles before them: 73 percent of the students in this Title I school are eligible for free or reduced lunch, and many come from families still recovering from the destruction caused by Hurricane Rita. Because engaging her students in learning is key to their success, Frederick makes daily use of Kidspiration®, the visual way to explore and understand words, numbers and concepts, from Inspiration® Software, Inc., to support teaching and learning across the curriculum.
Now in her third year as a teacher, Frederick began using Kidspiration with the kindergarten class she taught last year and today can scarcely imagine a classroom without it. “I know there are other ways I could teach, but my students wouldn’t be nearly as enthusiastic about learning,” she said.
Designed specifically for early learners in kindergarten through fifth grade, Kidspiration develops thinking, literacy and numeracy skills using proven visual learning techniques. In reading and writing, Kidspiration strengthens word recognition, vocabulary, comprehension and written expression. With Kidspiration’s visual math tools, students build reasoning and problem-solving skills.
With a sharp focus on boosting literacy skills, teachers at Fairview Elementary School conduct a school-wide 90-minute reading block each day, followed by 60 minutes of small-group reading. During some of this allotted time, Frederick uses Kidspiration to teach phonetic sounds. Each week, she focuses on one sound, such as “ch” or “wh,” and her students create “bubble diagrams” displaying at least five pictures that begin with the sound. Next, they use Kidspiration’s Record tool to record themselves saying the names of the pictures, making valuable literacy connections. After Frederick models what to do, every one of the 22 students completes the exercise, which is available on two classroom computers, by week’s end. “They just take off with it,” she said. “They’re definitely learning to read better with Kidspiration because they’re having so much fun with it.”
With Kidspiration’s Listen tool, students can hear words read aloud, strengthening word recognition and comprehension. Frederick said her students are always captivated by the tool. “They love hearing the computer voice speak the words, and it reinforces what they’re learning,” she said.
Teachers can use Kidspiration to create their own activity, as in this “Sequencing the Story” exercise from Frederick’s classroom.
When teaching writing skills, Frederick starts by helping students create a main idea in Kidspiration, after which they break down the sequence of ideas into boxes. Soon, they are writing sentences and piecing them together to create a story. She has put this writing exercise to work both as a whole class and with individual students. “All of my students enjoy using Kidspiration, and they can use it no matter what their skill level is,” she said. “Some take it to high levels and create their own stories. They are all gaining valuable skills and learning new concepts with it.”
In teaching math this year to first graders, Frederick noticed that it’s sometimes difficult for them to grasp subtraction. “They like to put it all together, not take it apart,” she said. She foresees using Kidspiration with them for learning everything from how to solve word problems in math to telling time. “They’re very visual, and Kidspiration has great manipulatives that will help them see the math and begin to develop an understanding of how it works.”
As part of a social studies unit examining other cultures, Frederick invited her sister, who had done missionary work in the Ukraine, to cook cuisine native to the region and share her knowledge of the culture. Incorporating Kidspiration into the lesson, Frederick guided the class in creating a Venn diagram to compare and contrast the various aspects of life in the Ukraine. “With Kidspiration, they could really visualize the similarities and differences,” she said. “It was all there for them to see.”
No matter the subject area, Frederick is committed to providing her students with a visual learning environment to help them meet state learning goals. With the wide variety of ready-to-use templates available in Kidspiration, Frederick said it’s “as easy as pulling them up and saving them—I don’t have to create them myself,” she said. “The possibilities are almost endless.”
Frederick was recently recognized as one of 12 Silver Star winners worldwide in Inspiration Software’s Inspired Learning Awards, for her creative use of Kidspiration. Since then, many of her colleagues at Fairview Elementary “are really looking at Kidspiration,” she said. “People are seeing its benefits, and I’m sure others will want it for their classrooms, too.”
With the school year just under way, Frederick has not been able to collect official data on her students’ progress, but she has seen higher levels of achievement and greater enthusiasm for learning since she started using Kidspiration. “I can tell you what I’m seeing—my students love Kidspiration, and they’re definitely learning better with it,” she said.
Frederick had her students use Kidspiration to help them identify a story’s main characters.
Excitement builds as kindergarten teacher Debi Stewart reaches into her “fairness cup” of popsicle sticks bearing her students’ names, to choose who will be next to take a turn using Kidspiration®, the visual way to explore and understand words, numbers and concepts, from Inspiration Software®. This time, they’re matching words that rhyme. With an easy motion, a student places “clock” and “block” and the accompanying graphics side by side. Stewart uses Kidspiration with an electronic whiteboard, so her students’ selections are displayed for all to see.
“When I turn on Kidspiration, they say, ‘Can we play now?’” said Stewart, who teaches at Genoa Elementary in Pasadena Independent School District, located near Houston. “They’re seeing, hearing and moving objects, which makes learning fun.”
Created for learners in kindergarten through fifth grade, Kidspiration develops thinking, literacy and numeracy skills using proven visual learning principles. In reading and writing, Kidspiration strengthens word recognition, vocabulary, comprehension and written expression. With Kidspiration’s visual math tools, students build reasoning and problem-solving skills. With 20 years of teaching experience behind her, Stewart considered herself “old school,” acknowledging her long-standing affection for paper and pencil. Until recently, her computer knowledge was limited to word processing and a little email and Internet browsing. Lately, she’s moved in a new direction, since discovering the range of learning opportunities available with Kidspiration—for both independent and teacher-initiated activities. And she’s gained a reputation in her district as a champion of technology—and more specifically, as “the Kidspiration person,” she said.
“You really lose out if you don’t learn the technology. I have about 10 more years to teach, and I need to be able to teach this way, because that’s how the kids are learning,” she noted.
With the Kidspiration template “The Wind Blew,” Stewart taught her students about nouns and verbs.
Since she first saw Kidspiration at a staff-development event, it’s become an indispensable part of her classroom—a tool she uses to support student learning in language arts, math, science and social studies.
“It hit me that I can apply Kidspiration throughout my day, to so many of my subjects,” she said. “I’ve really gotten into it, playing with it and making things.” She’s put some of her favorite worksheets in Kidspiration, which has “brought them to life.”
As a participant in Inspiration Software’s online Inspired Learning Community, Stewart has found and shared numerous lesson ideas with educators near and far. In the last six months, she has created nearly 150 Kidspiration templates “because I find it’s fun to make them from scratch,” she said. “My flash drive is almost overflowing with them.”
When her district’s curriculum doesn’t include resources for a lesson, she creates her own. “I’ve tried to fill in all the gaps, for my students and others in the district, and I’ve really enjoyed it so much,” she said.
For example, when she needed to teach her students the difference between living and nonliving things, she made a template and put her class to work on Kidspiration, moving pictures and words to the proper category. In the past, Stewart would create a poster or a bulletin board to teach such a concept. “Kidspiration is so much easier, and it really captures students’ attention. These are not the students we had 20 years ago. They want to learn with technology, and when they do, they’re so engaged in the learning,” she said.
When her class read “The Wind Blew,” she created a Kidspiration template to teach her students about nouns and verbs. Also in language arts, she made templates for reviewing letters and sight words and for learning compound words and ending sounds. In science, she’s used Kidspiration to teach the anatomy of an apple, the five senses, things that fly and don’t fly, and the hatching of an egg. In social studies, she’s used it to teach land forms and presidents, and in math to teach shapes and dividing them in half, as well as graphs and sorting.
She’s also taught analogies and relationships, real and make-believe, what belongs, and wants and needs, all using Kidspiration. When the holidays come, Stewart is prepared with templates for creating pumpkins, snowmen, presidents and valentines.
This Kidspiration lesson helps students identify objects other than shapes, by size.
With countless Kidspiration successes behind her, Stewart has been spreading the word within her school and district. After creating file after file of lesson plans in Kidspiration, she burned a CD to share with her colleagues. “I said, ‘This is so easy—go out and do this,’ and everyone was excited.”
Stewart has big plans for Kidspiration in the coming school year. In 2009, for the first time, the state of Texas required that kindergartners take the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills. Stewart said her kindergartners showed a need for improvement in vocabulary—a challenge she plans to take on with Kidspiration, using categories, retelling of stories and flow charts. In addition, she’ll develop a word list, and the students will locate pictures that relate to or describe the word, all with Kidspiration.
“Students will make sentences such as ‘I see a dog.’ We can expand that sentence by using more descriptive words. We can go from picture mode to writing mode and write, ‘I see a large black dog in the yard.’ Kidspiration has excellent clip art, which will allow the students to put a large black dog in a yard, in the picture mode, and then we will write about our picture,” she said.
In addition, Stewart plans to have her students author their own projects in Kidspiration. “It will contribute to their higher level thinking when they are responsible for their own learning,” she said.
“The kids have such a good time with Kidspiration, and it’s amazing to see how much they can do with it,” she said. “I just can’t believe how cool it is—I get so much joy out of it.”
When kindergarten teacher Hollie Furr sets out to teach her young learners about nutrition, she starts by using Kidspiration® 3 from Inspiration® Software, to sort by food groups, labeling each food under its picture. Then the students take over, identifying foods such as rice, yogurt and apples and placing them in the proper nutritional groups.
“When the kids are finished, they know which foods fall in which groups. The best part is they don’t realize it’s work, which is every teacher’s dream,” said Furr, who teaches at Cub Run Elementary, part of Rockingham County Public Schools in central Virginia.
Obe Hostetter, an instructional technology resource teacher for this district of 11,400 students and 21 schools, has been busy putting Kidspiration 3 into the hands of teachers in the elementary schools he supports. “This software is one of the easiest to learn and teach,” he said. He recalls an in-service day when he demonstrated Kidspiration, and “the teachers were so excited that they ordered it for their classrooms that day.”
To help teachers make the best use of Kidspiration with their students, Hostetter has compiled an impressive collection of templates—some created by teachers in his district and many he found on the Internet—that align with the state of Virginia’s Standards of Learning (SOL). He organizes the templates by grade level, making it easy for teachers to find the lessons they need to meet the standards. And, in many cases, what they are learning not only aligns with state standards, but it also supports the 21st Century Skills Framework.
Hollie Farr uses Kidspiration to teach her kindergarten students upper- and lower-case letters of the alphabet.
Whenever Hostetter sees a template he likes, he sends it to any teachers in his district who might be able to use it. “Some of the teachers have been very creative in making their own templates. People can change the templates and make them fit their own style, building on someone else’s creativity, not reinventing the wheel,” he said.
Hostetter’s also been sharing his templates with other districts across the state, and adding their best templates to his collection. His goal is to arm teachers with the best tools to help students succeed. “I know where teachers are coming from. There’s a lot to keep track of to meet the standards. If you make it easy and it’s helpful, they’ll use it.”
Numerous teachers in Rockingham County have been looking for help meeting social studies and science standards, said Hostetter, and now templates to address those standards are just a click away. He said teachers appreciate being able to preview a lesson in Kidspiration 3 without clicking it open. Another benefit is the ability to click on a word and hear it, which is especially helpful for younger students and English language learners. Kidspiration 3 also easily integrates with the district’s interactive whiteboards, “so they have fun using it,” he said.
In Furr’s classroom, lessons with Kidspiration have included make-believe versus real, money, upper- and lower-case letters of the alphabet, the weather, and dressing people with the right clothes for the season. With Kidspiration’s symbol library, teachers can type in the name of something, such as a frog, and it will immediately bring up a picture of it. “My favorite thing is how realistic the graphics are,” she said.
Her students are always on task with Kidspiration, she said—even those who typically have difficulty focusing. “They don’t look around and try to talk to other students, because they’re enjoying the assignments—they’re like games to them,” she said. “I’ve actually had kids cry when we’ve run out of time to finish an assignment in Kidspiration.”
Furr’s colleague Carolyn Miller teaches second grade at Cub Run Elementary, and she, too, is making great use of Kidspiration in her classroom—and has been for about five years. She finds it very useful for teaching writing—starting with Kidspiration “webs” where students’ ideas are developed, and progressing from there. “In second grade, they’re learning to organize their thoughts on paper. Kidspiration is an instant success because it helps students break down the task. It’s very easy for them to learn—they make the web, add pictures and then click to writing, and they can see how their thoughts translate to paragraphs,” she said.
Miller said she’s been amazed at the detail of the webs her students have created. “It’s like you gave them a piece of paper and crayon,” she said. “The templates are colorful and bright and pertain to what we’re doing. The kids are always excited about using Kidspiration.” Students feel a great sense of accomplishment, too, she said as they are making something that comes to fruition before their eyes.
A “big plus” that’s not available in other programs is the freedom to tailor the templates to meet the state standards, she said. “The basic templates and pictures are there, and we can put them together to create what we need.” She uses Kidspiration for lessons as well as reviews and tests. “It’s so much better than a worksheet,” she said.
For visual learners, Kidspiration is a real asset, said Miller, capturing their attention much better than reading alone. “For example, in learning about nouns and verbs, they’re seeing the visuals and manipulating them. They’re much more a part of the process.” Kidspiration is also useful for differentiating instruction for her students, said Miller. “I have second graders reading at fifth- and sixth-grade levels, and others who are just learning to read. Everyone is able to do research and webbing and create some wonderful pieces of writing.”
Students in Sue Haley’s second-grade classroom use Kidspiration to compare the ancient civilizations of Egypt and China.
In Sue Haley’s second-grade classroom at Rockingham County’s Mountain View Elementary, she and her students enjoy using Kidspiration templates on their interactive whiteboard. A recent lesson involved comparing the ancient civilizations of Egypt and China with Kidspiration symbols. They flipped to writing view and wrote short descriptions of the important contributions of the civilizations. “It’s a very powerful learning tool with graphic organizers to represent children’s understanding of difficult SOL concepts,” said Haley.
She said Kidspiration has helped her students learn to organize, compare and contrast difficult materials and works well with English language learners, students with special needs and gifted learners. “My students enjoy Kidspiration,” she said. “It’s simple for them to work with, and they love to take home what they’ve created.”
Hostetter noted that he sees students playing on Kidspiration, just for fun, when they get a chance. “That says something,” he said.
Added Miller, “Kidspiration is exciting for the students and easy for the teachers. There’s a lot of flexibility—it’s all right there.”
When her fourth-grade students started last school year with an average score of just 43 percent on state math benchmark tests, teacher Jennifer Patgorski was determined to find a way to engage them in learning so they could achieve at the levels she knew were possible. Today, the 112 students who pass through her classroom each day at John Tyler Elementary, part of Portsmouth Public Schools near Norfolk, Va., are reaching brand-new heights. Now with math test scores in the 80s, her students are realizing the greatest level of improvement in their school.
Patgorski credits the math tools in Kidspiration® 3, the visual way to explore words, numbers and concepts, with her students’ academic transformation. It all began after her colleague Brian McKee, a district technology resource teacher, suggested that Kidspiration might be the answer for her students, who were having difficulty focusing on math instruction. “Brian only had to show me Kidspiration once, and I was so excited that I stayed after school until 7:00 that night to see what it could do,” she said.
Three weeks into the school year, Patgorski’s students began using Kidspiration on the laptops in her classroom. Her first order of business was subtraction, a concept that was new to many of her students. After she used Kidspiration Base Ten Blocks™ to demonstrate the concept on an interactive whiteboard, her students quickly caught on and are now able to subtract with numbers in the millions. “They were able to split up the tens, and they became 10 ones. They could actually see the regrouping,” she explained. “They said, ‘wow, that was amazing.’”
Patgorski said Wednesday is her students’ favorite day of the week because they learn with Kidspiration. “On Wednesdays, they’re better behaved and more on task because using Kidspiration is a reward for them. When you pass out a worksheet, you have some who fill in answers just to get it done. This is a technology generation, and they learn so much more when we meet them where they are.”
Each week she introduces a new concept, and the next one will be fractions—a subject that will be easy to teach with Kidspiration Fraction Tiles™ and Kidspiration Fraction Boxes™, said Patgorski. “I found several fractions activities that are great—and the kids will really like them. I’ve put together my lesson plans for the next few months, and I have yet to find anything that I can’t teach with Kidspiration,” she said.
When her students took a recent assessment on multiplication, more than 85 percent passed, a number rarely seen so early in the school year. “We used Kidspiration to acclimate them to what multiplying really means,” said Patgorski. “They could see why eight times four is 32. Kidspiration makes it more relatable.”
Created for K-5 learners, Kidspiration develops thinking, literacy and numeracy skills using proven visual learning principles. In reading and writing, Kidspiration strengthens word recognition, vocabulary, comprehension and written expression. With the new visual math tools in Kidspiration 3, students build a strong mathematical foundation for reasoning and problem-solving by using visual representations to understand math concepts. Combining the hands-on learning power of manipulatives with the benefits of computer interactivity, Kidspiration gives students the tools to grasp essential and sometimes challenging math concepts.
Patgorski finds Kidspiration reaches students of every learning ability—from special education to advanced students. Even students with the most severe disabilities—those who require help from paraprofessionals to navigate the school day—are able to use Kidspiration, she said. “I put them on Kidspiration and they are able to fully participate, 100 percent, doing the exact same thing as everyone else. You can imagine how that makes them feel.”
Word is spreading about Kidspiration at John Tyler Elementary, said Patgorski, and another teacher will be using it to teach math soon. Patgorski’s been telling other teachers about it—and suggesting they try it with science, social studies and reading, too. “When I’m using it, I leave my door wide open so everyone can see how wonderful I am,” she said with a laugh. McKee, also, has been inspiring other district elementary teachers to try Kidspiration, and foresees more and more adoptions. “My push is to integrate technology as a resource that is part of the day—to get away from ‘drill and kill,’ which teachers and students are tired of,” he said.
In this district of more than 15,000 students, McKee oversees the technology needs of 1,100 students and 80 teachers. With approximately half of the students in the district qualifying for free or reduced lunch, many have struggles at home that make it difficult to focus at school. “These students need that little spark—we need to take them beyond the worksheet,” he said.
And when students are engaged in learning, class management is much easier, said McKee. After he brought Kidspiration to Patgorski’s math classes, “everyone was on task,” he said. “When one student started to be disruptive, she told him if he didn’t shape up, he’d have to do his work with paper and pencil. You can’t believe how quickly he snapped into shape.” Perhaps the best part of using Kidspiration is the plentiful opportunities it provides for “light-bulb moments,” said McKee. “When you see that teachable moment and the student says, ‘I get it,’ that’s why we went into teaching.”
At a recent district technology training day, the largest turnout was for a session on Kidspiration 3, he said. “The reaction was, ‘oh, my—that is amazing,’” said McKee. “We had teachers and paraprofessionals from all over the city come in to see it. When they tried it, you could feel their excitement as they discussed the ways they could use it to reach their students in all subjects.”
“I’m a visual person,” says Patti Weeg, the Title 1 Computer Teacher at Delmar Elementary in Delmar, Maryland. She meets the needs of her students the same way she meets her own: by teaching to the visual learner in every student. Kidspiration, with its colors and pictures, grabbed her attention immediately as a program that her students would respond to, and she was right.
Weeg is directly responsible for her six computers in the Title I lab, but she’s also nominally in charge of the 26 Pentiums in a computer lab nearby that serves 1,000 students in Pre- K through grade 5. She helps “next door” by making Kidspiration templates for other teachers to use in the lab with their students. Having a template in place allows the youngsters to get right to the lesson; their teacher has already done the set-up work in the classroom so students can dive right into using the computers and the software.
Initially, Weeg thought Kidspiration was only a writing tool because it was presented to her through story webs. But once she had the chance to really use the software, it became very clear that this was a tool suitable for nearly any subject.
For example, browsing Kidspiration’s different symbol libraries revealed colorful sets tailored for geography, math, plants and animals, food and health, science, social studies, language arts, school days, and more. Weeg discovered that teachers could build an earthscience activity, for example, in 10 minutes just by placing symbols for trees, water, air, wind, and soil into a Kidspiration diagram with a few labels and arrows. Students can then fill in the blanks, or drag arrows around to indicate how the cycle works. The options are endless.
Moreover, browsing the 75 activity templates included with the program demonstrated to her the many ways in which Kidspiration could be used for social studies, science, math, or reading and writing. Many of the activity templates also cross narrow subject boundaries and Weeg especially likes that approach. Her first forays with the program bear that out.
One of Weeg’s early Kidspiration lessons covered both math and pre-reading skills. She designed a click-anddrag alphabet activity for kindergartners in which they had to separate those letters made only of curves from letters made only of straight lines, from a third group of letters made of both. This incorporates the concepts of letter recognition, and introduces students to the idea of organizing sets and subsets as well. Plus, the students get a kick out of kinesthetically dragging letters around on screen.
In a similar activity, first graders work with money amounts; if the object costs eight cents, the student has to drag over a nickel and three pennies. This addresses the skills of addition, reading, and identifying monetary amounts. And unlike a paper worksheet, if the lesson is not done exactly right the first time, with Kidspiration, students can easily start over and still print out a clean final copy.
One project that got everyone excited this year was a story web put together by the kindergartners. It was a simple “About Me” exercise (my hair is brown, my eyes are blue, etc.) that each student did. What made it extra special was including the students’ own faces in their story webs. Weeg scanned in every child’s photo, placing it in the middle of each student’s story web. “When the little ones saw their own face on that screen, that was just precious,” she recalls. “They were so excited.”
Existing projects at Delmar Elementary have also gotten a lift from Kidspiration. For instance, via an Authors in Residence program, second and third graders traditionally build an original story. This year, the fivemonth project utilized Kidspiration to create story webs and outlines for these original tales which the young authors could then produce into a bound book.
To ensure she utilizes the full power of Kidspiration and doesn’t depend solely on visual worksheets, Weeg is careful to incorporate a writing element into every template she creates. For example, in a cause-and-effect exercise, third graders were asked to drag causes into one group and effects into another. They then had to create their own effect to explain a chosen cause, and type it into a Text Box.
This “taking it one step further” ability is, Weeg feels, one of many characteristics that Kidspiration has going for it. Ease of use is another significant plus. Teachers have found it very easy to use; and Weeg herself uses Kidspiration to make presentations for her professional colleagues outside of class.
Young students find Kidspiration “visually appealing,” she says, so they want to build with it and explore in it. In fact, Weeg comments that students usually learn the program more quickly than their teachers do because “they are not afraid to explore.”
Her next step, says Weeg, is to motivate more teachers to build their own templates. Once they’ve learned the process of making and using a customized Kidspiration template, they’ll gain confidence and find many creative and practical uses, she believes. It was how she learned the program herself, and it was “awfully easy.” Confident of a great future, Weeg continues to discover new ideas in the software, and feels “sure there are many untapped resources [she] can provide for the teachers” through Kidspiration.
“Some kids are so visual,” says Pattie Knox, Tech Specialist and self-appointed Head Cheerleader for Kidspiration software in North Canton City School District, Ohio. “You can give kids a blank piece of paper and they don’t know where to begin,” but with a Kidspiration template, they have the visual cues they need to organize their thoughts into a cohesive whole. When the students switch from the template to the outline, they “are amazed to see what they’ve done.”
That “ah ha” moment is enough for Knox. Since first seeing a Kidspiration demonstration, she has pushed steadily for her schools to adopt it. Starting in the fall of 2002, the district will have 200 Kidspiration licenses and 200 Inspiration® licenses spread over four elementary schools with five computers per classroom. And Knox is excited by the possibilities, to say the least. Professional development begins this summer. Teachers will be required to attend a one-hour introduction to Kidspiration where they will learn to understand the software, learn to design their own templates, and get a glimpse of what they can do in their classes. This required training is a first for the district. Usually what happens, says Knox, is “we buy some software, we put it on all of the computers, and some teachers use it, some don’t.” This time, all the teachers will be trained on Kidspiration and Inspiration, and there will be a coordinated push to have them integrate the programs into their classrooms.
“As a tech specialist, I can see that in the long run we will save money on software. If we take the time to train our teachers in Kidspiration [and Inspiration] use, we’ll eliminate the perceived need for specialized software. Kidspiration is truly cross-curricular, it can be used to do almost anything.” Teachers can create tailor-made activities that address concepts anywhere in the curriculum. “We’re not buying software,” says Knox, “we’re buying a teaching concept.”
The district received the software just last month, in April of 2002. But teachers didn’t wait for their summer training before they started to put Kidspiration to use in their classroom. Some jumped right in. In one school, for instance, fifth graders designed Kidspiration templates for their first-grade “book buddies.” The older kids created a lesson for their younger buddies, then sat down with them to help them work through it. Fifth graders first recorded the instructions in their own voices, then chose words and pictures for the template that the first graders had to click and drag to the appropriate places. Both sets of students benefited: the fifth graders learned by teaching others, while the first graders learned both the lesson in the template and the “I can do it” satisfaction that came from completing it. Working in pairs is a useful strategy even without a second class. For instance, Knox likes to pair up two first graders at each computer: one to read the instructions, the other to work with Kidspiration at the keyboard. Then they switch. This method frees up a lot of an instructor’s time, as well as empowers students to think that they are running their own show. Knox says this approach has been used successfully in multiple grade levels for lessons involving “compare and contrast” and to teach about the different branches of the U.S. government, for example.
Knox is also a great believer in the Web as a medium for learning. She loves the fact that it is so easy to convert Kidspiration documents to HTML format—just a few simple clicks—which allows her to post students’ work online quickly. She has been part of several collaborative online projects and is looking forward to the next one, which will be centered entirely on Kidspiration.
The ability to share templates is just one reason for her enthusiasm. “We love that we get ideas and lesson plans from across the country” for things to do with Kidspiration, Knox comments. First-grade teachers nationwide need to teach the same concepts, and they are all looking for new and stimulating ways to present those concepts. Sharing Kidspiration templates via the Web is like tapping into a global teaching community. “If a teacher in California can find a template online made by a teacher in Ohio, that’s awesome,” she explains.
Kidspiration’s future in North Canton looks bright. Knox sees the use of Kidspiration expanding from language arts to other disciplines in a natural progression. For instance, Kidspiration is “incredible for classifying,” and she is already dreaming up ideas for more Web-based applications that highlight that functionality, as well as more math and science templates.
Or perhaps she will focus on boosting the district’s fourth-grade proficiency scores, which are always a big challenge, she says. A series of Kidspiration templates could easily be developed to address those specific concepts. She has a few months to decide. Mostly, however, Knox is “just excited to find out how I’m going to use it,” she concludes after her few weeks of experience with the versatile software. “Kidspiration has just got it all!”
Graphical organizing program supports New York education standards, helping students learn to organize and plan for writing
Fourth grade students in Leah Floriano’s classroom at Iroquois Intermediate School in Elma, New York, use Kidspiration to build writing skills. Creative brainstorming and webbing activities help students visualize their ideas and get organized before they start the writing process. The result is better writing. Plus, Kidspiration helps Floriano align her curriculum to meet district and state standards.
Floriano was introduced to Kidspiration and Inspiration in a technology course as part of her master of education program. She immediately saw Kidspiration’s value for her students. Standards in the Iroquois Central School District call for the use of graphical organizers to help students learn to process, analyze, and organize information. Before discovering Kidspiration, Floriano’s students used paper and pencil to create webs and graphical organizers—a time-consuming and tedious process—but necessary to teach students about planning and organizing for writing.
During a student’s fourth grade year, the first round of state tests in language arts, math, and science are administered. Students are required to write essays for the English Language Arts (ELA) tests, which are partially evaluated on organization, clarity, and the presence of key story elements. “Pre-writing activities in Kidspiration are definitely a great preparation for the ELA test,” says Floriano.
Students enter Floriano’s classroom from third grade knowing how to write sentences and paragraphs, but they have not yet mastered the skills needed to develop an entire story with a beginning, middle, and end. Floriano soon found that creating webs and other graphical organizers in Kidspiration helped students learn how to incorporate and organize all the elements of a story before they began their writing.
In her !rst year teaching fourth grade, Floriano was anxious to make a good impression with an upcoming lesson that her principal, Donna Eno, would observe. Although she had never used Kidspiration with her students, Floriano decided to put the visual learning program to the test during the observation.
Leah Floriano’s fourth grade students create Kidspiration diagrams to brainstorm and organize their thoughts before they start to write.
In preparation for the class, Floriano created a Kidspiration web with an overview of a story the class had recently read. On the day of the observation, she read the story to the class, showed them the diagram, and explained how she created it in Kidspiration. Students gathered around the computer as Floriano demonstrated how to use Kidspiration and showed students some of the symbols in the library. To help them understand the steps of creating a graphical organizer, Floriano did a “talk-aloud,” talking the students through the thinking process of creating a diagram in Kidspiration. She solicited suggestions from the students, and the class worked together to create a new web with details from a story they had recently read.
After a break, students returned to the classroom to take turns working individually with Kidspiration on the classroom’s five computers. They created graphical organizers about themselves, illustrating their interests and describing their lives. Then students used the webs they had created to give them ideas for the introductory letters they were writing to their pen pals in Virginia. “Students love using the computer, but this was their !rst experience using it for anything other than educational games,” states Floriano. “They had a great time using Kidspiration, and thought of it as fun, not work.”
In the end, the students’ projects were a huge success. Not only had Floriano introduced her students to a new way of organizing their thoughts and ideas, but she had made a positive impression on Principal Eno during the process. “Floriano has done an excellent job of integrating technology into her instructional program,” says Eno. “She has aligned the curriculum to meet the New York State Standards with technology as an integral tool.”
Floriano recognizes the power of visual learning to help students who learn best visually. “I am a visual learner, and there must be visual learners in my classroom as well,” she says. “Kidspiration is a technology tool that children can use successfully and enjoy using at the same time. I can’t imagine teaching without it.”
Canby, Oregon. Kindergartners in Canby, Oregon are writing their own books and taking them home to read to their parents. Kidspiration is helping the students use pictures and symbols to paraphrase the stories their teacher reads in class, so they can “read” them to their parents after school.
“To help students learn to read and write, we need to get them excited and help them make a personal connection with the story,” explains Jennifer Gingerich, district technology trainer for the Canby School District. The youngsters are getting extra reading and writing help from Kidspiration, a software program that students grades K-5 use for creative pre-writing exercises, for reading practice and a variety of other activities designed to build strong thinking skills.
The school district chose Kidspiration and several other programs to help its K-5 teachers use technology to encourage reading and writing skills. It’s all part of a schoolboard initiative to focus on literacy, funded by a grant from the state’s Department of Education. The grant allows the district to provide technology and staff development to support reading and writing at key benchmarks.
With nearly 400 copies of Kidspiration installed in the district’s "ve elementary schools, all teachers have access to the program—and they love it. “Kidspiration is a wonderful program for the many features that help students learn to read and write,” says Gingerich. “As I evaluated Kidspiration for the "rst time, I just kept saying ‘wow!’ as I discovered all the features geared specifically to help students learn to read and write. The SuperGrouper® tool, the picture-to-topic feature and speech support are just a few of the tools that make Kidspiration a great fit for K-5 students.”
John Gingerich, the district’s technology coordinator, says Kidspiration is a key part of encouraging teachers to integrate technology in their lessons. “Our teachers can creatively use the software throughout their curricula to create activities that provide students with a variety of ways to sharpen their skills in reading and writing,” he says. “Kidspiration is also easy to learn, which makes it a great program for our technology literacy project.”
To implement the software program and align it with standards, the district held a planning day for its technology integration team, a group consisting of one teacher from each grade level in each school. The teachers were shown how to teach using Kidspiration in their lessons. Afterward, they discussed the reading and writing benchmarks to be met during the next semester as part of the literacy challenge. Jennifer Gingerich followed up with a visit to each classroom, providing model lessons to help the teachers gain confidence in using technology as part of their instruction. She conducted some lessons in each school’s computer lab and used wireless handheld computers, purchased with grant funds, for others.
The lesson plans created in Kidspiration for kindergarten and "rst-grade classes leverage the value of visual learning. Students might be asked to "nd pictures that start with a certain letter of the alphabet, to finish patterns or to find rhyming words. In second- and third-grade classrooms, kids may write a letter to a friend, alphabetize words or retell a story’s sequence of events. Every activity is designed to help teachers integrate Kidspiration into lesson plans that align directly with literacy standards.
In Patti Monte’s kindergarten classroom, the students have just listened to Monte read Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? Now Monte has the children mimic Brown Bear, asking them to name the animals they see, just like the bear. She then takes them to the computer lab, where each student uses Kidspiration to create a web diagram to represent animals they see.
First, the students type their names at the center of the web. Next, each selects a symbol of their favorite animal to represent themselves. Then they add pictures from the program’s library of animal symbols, using the picture-to-topic options to label each animal. Finally, Monte prints the paraphrased stories so the kindergartners can take them home to “read” to their families.
Gingerich says the students love using Kidspiration to visually repeat what they’ve learned while adding their own special symbols. “This activity helps to reinforce what the kids have read and to bring a part of themselves into what they are reading,” she says. “Making the connections between words and pictures is one of the biggest bene"ts to students.”
Kidspiration activity “What do you see” meets a variety of education standards and allows Kindergarteners to demonstrate their learning in a creative and fun way.
At Clairemont Elementary School in Decatur, Ga., kindergarteners enter a world of visual experiences, full of new opportunities to develop skills and learning patterns that will inspire life-long learning. Kindergarten teacher, Heather Borowski uses Kidspiration® 2.1 with a Promethean ActivBoard to provide interactive lessons, teach new information, practice key concepts and excite students about learning.
While attending the 2004 Florida Education Technology Conference in Orlando, Borowski—a library media specialist at the time—watched a presentation of Kidspiration 2.1 on a Promethean ActivBoard. “My head was spinning as I watched the presentation on the exhibit hall floor,” says Borowski. “I felt strongly that my students had to have the opportunity to learn this way.”
After returning from the conference, Borowski was instrumental in convincing her principal to attend a presentation and consequently purchase ActivBoards for four classrooms. The school’s instructional computers were already equipped with Kidspiration 2 licenses.
Borowski was so captivated by the possibilities provided by a “21st Century Classroom” that she asked to transfer into the classroom as a teacher while continuing to mentor fellow teachers. Her principal agreed. The following year, Borowski moved into a kindergarten classroom equipped with four instructional computers and an interactive whiteboard.
Heather Borowski’s kindergarten students explore Kidspiration on an interactive whiteboard.
Borowski’s classroom is comprised of a diverse mix of learners. Kidspiration meets the student’s needs, with features optimized for interactive whiteboards: toolbars that move to the bottom of the screen for easy access by students; and the ability to sketch symbols, draw links and write text directly on the whiteboard. Borowski believes the principles of visual learning are the key to helping her students learn. “Along with hearing words read aloud, the visual learning aspect of Kidspiration is helping my special needs students connect words with meaning,” says Borowski. “Plus, the tactile, kinesthetic nature of Kidspiration, where students get to physically move things around on the screen and associate actions with results, is great for all students at this age.”
Borowski likes Kidspiration for its intuitive interface, its integrated Picture and Writing Views, the 1,200 kid-friendly symbols organized into libraries, and her favorite: Symbol Maker. According to Borowski, at the beginning of the school year most of the students do not have the ability to draw symbols with a mouse, but they have no problems using a stylus to create their own symbols on the whiteboard.
During the first weeks of this school year, the students used Kidspiration for an introductory “all about me” activity. First, the class did a whole group exercise to learn about Kidspiration and to practice moving things around on the board. Then Borowski brought students individually to the whiteboard to draw pictures using Kidspiration’s Symbol Maker. “The students love using Kidspiration,” says Borowski. “It’s so bright and colorful and interactive. They can personalize their diagrams by drawing their own face or a dog that looks like their dog.”
Other teachers in the school requested help from Borowski in integrating Kidspiration into the curriculum. She worked with a second-grade teacher to create a unit on community helpers that incorporated Kidspiration. Students began by brainstorming questions they wanted to answer as part of a KWL chart in Kidspiration. After gathering research, students created graphic organizers that answered their questions. “Students had a clear picture of how to organize their research,” Borowski adds. “And the outline version of their graphic organizer was a literal diving board for their writing.”
Borowski creates sorting and grouping activities as practice and assessment tools.
Students finished the project by completing their KWL charts and writing a book about the community helpers. According to Borowski, the second-grade teacher was thrilled with the lesson’s success and repeated it again the following year. “She loved it,” said Borowski, “the way Kidspiration helped her students to organize their knowledge, the way she could easily assess what they learned and the way it motivated her students.”
Kidspiration’s versatility and variety of learning benefits gave Borowski ideas for ways to use the software in her own classroom. She plans to use Kidspiration for letter and phonics recognition, rhyming words and other sorting and categorizing activities in a variety of subjects, such as sorting fruits and vegetables into SuperGrouper® categories. “Kindergarteners are fearless when it comes to technology; they do things intuitively,” says Borowski. “Kidspiration helps my students to take that natural ability and develop skills and learning techniques that will help them be successful throughout their lives.”
When teachers from Denver Public Schools put Inspiration® and Kidspiration® on the top of their technology wish list, district administrators discovered that the Inspiration Software® Comprehensive License Program was an easy, cost-effective and legally licensed way to put the visual learning software products at their fingertips. Now with the graphic organizers loaded on all instructional computers, teachers in grades K-12 are using visual learning across the curriculum to help students develop strong thinking and organizational skills and improve their academic performance.
More than 250 teachers from Denver Public Schools went to the Colorado Technology in Education Conference looking for new ways to use technology to improve teaching and learning for the city’s 73,000 students. In follow-up workshops with many of these teachers, they expressed a strong interest in using Inspiration and Kidspiration in their classrooms and schools.
Educational Technology Specialist Lee Hayward says it is rare to find teachers agreeing on the same new instructional tool, but when his district’s teachers talk about using Inspiration and Kidspiration, their enthusiasm is apparent.
“I love Kidspiration for grades K to 5 because it is so incredibly versatile,” says Erin Daly, a technology teacher at Schenck Elementary School. “I adapt any curricular lesson to use Kidspiration. Visual organizers are available for math, science, language arts or social studies. It is an essential tool in my tech lab.”
Many Denver teachers were already using Inspiration and Kidspiration before the movement for districtwide adoption grew out of the education technology conference. In the past, individual schools bought single copies of Inspiration and Kidspiration for classrooms and computer labs and the district purchased a copy for each elementary school. However, Hayward says, “We really wanted students using the software at all grade levels and across the curriculum.”
Denver Public Schools was looking for an easy, cost-effective and legally licensed way to make the visual learning software products available to all teachers and students. When Hayward learned about the Inspiration Software Comprehensive License Program, he decided that it would meet the district’s needs, offering an easy way to purchase Inspiration and Kidspiration with the confidence that all copies are properly licensed.
When the Educational Technology Department had a discussion about how to spend some Title IID money, it decided to pursue purchase of the comprehensive license from Inspiration Software. This was an exception for Denver schools, says Hayward. As a district that is managed at the buildinglevel, decisions about purchasing instructional materials are normally made by each school. In fact, Inspiration Software is Denver Public Schools’ only comprehensive instructional software license. “This is not normally something we do,” he adds.
Hayward worked with Inspiration Software to come up with a “Good Faith Estimate” of the number of instructional computers in the district—the comprehensive volume licensing program doesn’t require an exact count of computers. He was pleased to learn that the district’s current licenses for Inspiration and Kidspiration were considered when the pricing for the license was determined. Also because the comprehensive licensing program is reviewed and adjusted for new computers just once annually, Hayward only needs to place one order per year with Inspiration Software. He now saves valuable time that in the past might have been spent getting approval for and processing multiple orders throughout the school year. The district will also get special pricing on future upgrades.
“Inspiration Software worked closely with us and so it was easy to offer our teachers and students access to these valuable learning tools,” Hayward says. “We anticipate that it will be easy to manage the licenses.”
Hayward and his colleagues knew that purchasing the comprehensive license was only the first step in encouraging the use of visual learning throughout the district. The software was installed on computers throughout Denver’s 148 schools over a two-month period. With the software, teachers received a twopage “Quickie” tip sheet to help them quickly learn to use Inspiration and Kidspiration.
Hayward and his team then used Inspiration Software’s professional development scripts to develop in-service training on visual learning teaching strategies. These workshops are being conducted throughout the district as requested by principals and teachers.
“With the ease of managing the Inspiration Software comprehensive license, we were able to put our time and energy into ensuring that our teachers have adequate professional development on using Inspiration and Kidspiration to support instruction,” adds Hayward.
Hayward says that because Inspiration and Kidspiration were number one on the Denver teachers’ wish list, enthusiasm for using the software in the classroom is the highest he has ever seen for a technology learning tool. Teachers in grades K-12 are using the software to support teaching and learning, and visual learning is becoming an important part of the district’s instructional program at all levels. For example, Elma Ruiz, a member of the district’s central literacy team and coordinator of the Reading First grant, says they have added Inspiration and Kidspiration to the district’s list of approved literacy software.
“We have only just begun to see the benefits. We anticipate great things as the school year progresses,” concludes Hayward.
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Links:
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[2] http://www.inspiration.com/javascript%3Avoid%280%29%3B
[3] http://www.inspiration.com/sites/default/files/images/case_studies/CaseStudy_Insp_WestChicago.pdf
[4] http://www.inspiration.com/sites/default/files/images/case_studies/CaseStudy_Insp_AcademyPark.pdf
[5] http://www.inspiration.com/sites/default/files/images/case_studies/CaseStudy_Insp_Gateway_0.pdf
[6] http://www.cathedral-school.net/centennialproject/default.htm
[7] http://www.inspiration.com/sites/default/files/images/case_studies/CaseStudy_Insp_CathedralSchool_0.pdf
[8] http://www.inspiration.com/sites/default/files/images/case_studies/CaseStudy_WestMemorial.pdf
[9] http://www.inspiration.com/sites/default/files/images/case_studies/Inspiration illuminates_Inspiration CS.pdf
[10] http://www.inspiration.com/sites/default/files/images/case_studies/San Diego_Inspiration CS.pdf
[11] http://www.inspiration.com/sites/default/files/images/case_studies/NE state education_Inspiration CS.pdf
[12] http://www.inspiration.com/sites/default/files/images/case_studies/Inspiration scores with Montana_Inspiration CS.pdf
[13] http://www.inspiration.com/sites/default/files/images/case_studies/With Inspiration & TeamWork-Inspiration CS.pdf
[14] http://www.inspiration.com/sites/default/files/images/case_studies/Students' Inspiration projects_Inspiration CS.pdf
[15] http://www.inspiration.com/sites/default/files/images/case_studies/Inspiration gives students an edge_Inspiration CS.pdf
[16] http://www.inspiration.com/sites/default/files/images/case_studies/Denver teachers_Inspiration Case Study.pdf
[17] http://www.inspiration.com/sites/default/files/images/case_studies/NY State Regents_Inspiration CS.pdf
[18] http://www.inspiration.com/sites/default/files/images/case_studies/FL alternative school_Inspiration CS.pdf
[19] http://www.inspiration.com/sites/default/files/images/case_studies/Middle school students_Inspiration CS.pdf
[20] http://www.inspiration.com/Resources/Case-Studies#top
[21] http://www.inspiration.com/sites/default/files/images/case_studies/WebspirationClassroomCaseStudy.pdf
[22] http://www.inspiration.com/sites/default/files/images/case_studies/CaseStudy_Data_AncillaeAssumpta.pdf
[23] http://www.inspiration.com/sites/default/files/images/case_studies/CaseStudy_Data_NWClassen_4.pdf
[24] http://www.inspiration.com/sites/default/files/images/case_studies/LA Chemistry Students - CS.pdf
[25] http://www.inspiration.com/sites/default/files/images/case_studies/Minnesota teacher applies - CS.pdf
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[28] http://www.inspiration.com/sites/default/files/images/case_studies/CaseStudy_Kids_GlenAllen.pdf
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[32] http://www.inspiration.com/sites/default/files/images/case_studies/CaseStudy_Kids_Portsmouth.pdf
[33] http://www.inspiration.com/sites/default/files/images/case_studies/Kidspiration templates launch_Kidspiration CS.pdf
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