Thursday, February 4, 2010

I thought the video was detailed and interesting. It basically has everything a student would need to make a slideshow presentation or help organize ideas for an essay. I would use it in my classroom not only for myself, to help with visual learners, but also encourage my students to take advantage of all the helpful tools it provides. When you think about it, most students stress out the most about the organization of an essay and how to start it; this could easily minimize that stress and provide more creativity than only using pen and paper.

As I said in my previous paragraph, I think this tool would be especially useful for essays. The different ways it allows students to organize and manage their thoughts is great. Of course it would also be great for projects that they wish to present in powerpoint format. Not only would this would this be great for personal use, but also can be used for peer review. It would be easy enough for students to print out their outlines and give them to their peers for review, because sometimes it is not easy to read handwriting. However I would not encourage students to email eachother their outlines or anything of the such for peer reveiw, it would be too easy for copying.

2 comments:

  1. I agree that using Inspiration would be a good way for students to organize essays. Organization really is one thing a lot of students struggle with (even many people in college still struggle with it). Like you said, it allows them to be more creative than just writing it out, and I hadn't thought about it being less stressful, but I think that's true too.

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  2. I agree that the inspiration program is a great tool to use in the classroom for several reasons. As you did, I also noticed how easy this program makes the prewriting process. I know, as a student, I sometimes find it difficult to organize my thoughts, therefore, making the prewriting of essays dreadful. On the other hand, with this program my students may avoid this dreadfulness and time consuming process. Furthermore, I didn't think of the advantage of increasing readability.

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