1- Learning Through Visuals - Inspiration 8

(Figure 1 - shows a 'mind map' created using Inspiration 8 showing children the many types of animals in our world)

Inspiration 8

The focus of our first week in ICT was how we deliver information to children and how they analyse, interpret, organise and remember information. The best way to deliver information to children is through ‘visual imagery’ such as images from clipart, photographs and simple graphs/tables. During our workshop we were introduced to a wonderful program - ‘Inspiration 8’ which effectively allows us to do deliver important information in a creative and visual manner.

Inspiration 8 makes it easy for students and teachers to;

• Create projects and/or lessons that are easy to understand as there are many templates to choose from and many training videos that show you common features and uses of the program.
• Hyperlink to URLs
• Add text, images and multimedia files from other sources to Inspiration projects.
• Organise ideas
• Be creative in teaching any subject
• Choose ‘safe’ images as it contains over 1,000 images suitable for children. http://www.softwaretime.com.au/ accessed March 5 2009 and search Inspiration 8.

I personally loved the 'mind maps' feature of this program as it is a great interactive way of brainstorming class ideas quickly and effectively. It encourages users to group ideas into branches or sub areas by creating an actual branch by the click of a button. It was extremely 'user friendly' and gone are the days of jotting done lots of words on the board and accidentally rubbing them out with your arm or trying to work out what you have written!!! Children and adults can easily understand the diagram.

A mind map could easily be created during a Science lesson for example 'Biology' and sorting out living things and non-living things. You could begin the brainstorming process with a picture of the earth and then one branch to the heading 'living things' and another to 'non-living things and the teacher can ask each student in the class for an example and enter each suggestion as text or an image. The teacher could then create another branch for living things i.e. vegetable or animal etc. Children can understand the relationships as they are visually represented in the mind map via the branches. (see figure 1)

Our first Workshop and Lecture for ICT were quite informative. They both educated me on some of the new technologies used in schools and informed me about how ICT is integrated into the curriculum and classroom in today's schools. Classrooms sure have changed since I was in Prep in 1984. I am looking forward to learning much, much more in ICT and I look forward to using the technology learned this semester in my classroom.