Inspiration

Inspiration is an online tool that is used to create different charts, diagrams and graphic organizers. Our project was to create a graphic organizer that could be used in our discipline based off of a text book. What went well is that the program is very user friendly. As a person who likes to just click around and explore, I found that everything I was looking for was easy to find. One thing I did not like was that after changing the background color, the tags on the connecting arrows still had a white background. I guess this could be beneficial to the students to have it stand out but I found it to be more of a distraction from the larger topics at hand. I also found it really hard to type mathematics equations because there was no math typer. This makes equations really hard to read. Aside from that, I liked the program a lot. If I were to redo this project, I would open it up so that students have freedom outside of their discipline. I feel as if mathematics isn't necessarily the best subject for a graphic organizer of this type because so many times you need to show examples or steps of how to solve a problem. I found it very difficult to be thorough without using too many words. I think Inspiration is a great tool which should be utilized in the classroom in many ways. You could use it to have students create a web about themselves in order to get to know them, use it as a creative way to display classroom rules or even have students create their own. Students could create an Inspiration project on the history of a mathematician, definitions associated with different topics or even to link practical applications with different topics (which seems to be a huge problem that many students believe exists in mathematics-no practical applications. They're wrong, however, so having them web out the applications might be very beneficial for the students). Overall, I like Inspiration and can see myself using it in the classroom.