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What does it do? Inspiration is an electronic graphic organizer that inspires students to develop ideas and organize their thinking. It includes tools for creating visual webs, idea maps, concept maps, outlines and much more. A huge database of symbols & pictures, templates, and instant connection to the Internet keep this version 6.0 up-to-date. |
How does this tie in with comprehension strategies in Grades 4-8? Inspiration's tools encourage active learning opportunities during which students clarify their thinking, organize and prioritize information and recognize patterns and relationships. For writing, the tools can help with brainstorming, organizing ideas, adding details and summarizing the main ideas. For increased comprehension of new concepts, the tools can help students trace plots, sequence events, expand their understanding of vocabulary words or thematic issues, compare and contrast, describe cause and effect relationships, and make personal connections with photos, clip art or illustrations. Most of the higher level thinking strategies that we ask students to apply in these grades can be practiced using the tools within Inspiration. | |
Online Resources | Online Examples
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Plains Indians: Textbook Activity 1 This vocabulary activity should be completed prior to students reading
the chapter to find out how much they know about the important concepts
that will be introduced in this chapter. The purpose at this point
is to generate active student discussion with the terms they will encounter
and to work collaboratively to sort and link the terms in some way.
It is OK is the resulting "web" is not completely accurate, AS LONG AS
students then return to the same web after reading to reconstruct their
idea web to more accurately reflect the way the terms are used in the textbook
chapter. This type of activity works best when students complete
it with at least one partner; the more people in a group, however, the
more difficult this task becomes (as all students are expected to come
to a consensus before creating their ultimate idea web). If students
are not familiar with a term, they are asked to make an educated guess
what other terms it may be related to. Again, after reading, they
can go back and "fix" their web.
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This outline of important details was constructed as a template in Inspiration by a teacher after reading a textbook chapter. Students are asked to rearrange the details listed below the main heading ideas based on information they read in the chapter. They can complete this as they read the chapter with a partner, or they can complete it after they read the chapter (with a partner or independently). After the details have been sorted, a class discussion will be held to see if everyone is in agreement about how the chapter is organized. Student can then use the Inspiration's outline tools to expand on the details, rewording phrases into complete sentences and/or restructuring the main idea and details into summary paragraphs. Students can also print out the final outline and use it as they study for a test.
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Tut's Mummy, Lost ... and Found
Inspiration Response Activity This image shows a variety of ways for children to drag vocabulary terms and match to photographs that were cut and paste from the Internet. Labels can have borders around them or left plain, arrows can be linked from the term to the correct picture, students can define the word within the arrow, or users can draw lines from a term to the correct part of a photography. The template can be set up ahead of time with photos on one side and terms on the other, or photos can be stored in a file and advanced students can copy and paste the photos into the file. Students can work on this project in a small group and the visual format of the diagram can be left open-ended; the only requirement is that the terms are correctly matched up with photographs. For enrichment, students could even use this diagram as the basis of a "homepage" and then provide links to a web site about each term or links to a page they wrote that further defines each term. |
Source: student work samples from California |
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