Week 1: What can we make with Inspiration?

                               

 Our first workshop for Learning Technologies required us to set up this blog. I've never had a blog or webpage before, I'm not even on Facebook, so this is all new to me!

Pleasantly, setting up this blog was not hard to do, I can picture primary school children would be able to do this task without a worry. I remember when I was in primary school we had to keep a written diary, where we would write about what we did over the weekend, and then the teacher would read it and correct our spelling. I can imagine in the modern classroom a blog could replace this diary writing, as a virtual journal.

That said, I think there is still merit in written diaries, especially for the younger levels, as a way to practice the necessary handwriting skills. I remember writing in my diary in primary school and enjoying illustrating my entries with pictures. Although drawing is not a skill I need to use much in my adult life, I think it is still worth incorporating into the classroom as a way of engaging students and developing creative skills and expression. Multiple intelligence theory suggests that there are some people who would particularly benefit from written work and drawing, those with Linguistic and Spatial intelligences. One of the best ways for people with strong Linguistic intelligence to learn is by note taking (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences), I interpreted this as written notes but am curious as to whether this extends to typing notes.

Other than setting up this blog, our other task for our Learning Technology workshop was to create a flowchart on the topic of our choice. I chose to think back to my VCE Biology and create a flowchart showing the basic kingdoms we classify lifeforms into. You can see it below. This flowchart was created using a program called Inspiration which is apparently quite a popular program in Primary Schools. The White Paper threw it's support behind Inspiration, suggesting that the program could be used to as a visual learning tool to " help students to take notes, brainstorm and synthesize their ideas into diagrams or outlines".Furthermore, it stated that " because students were able to show the connections and see the relationship between ideas, they were able to develop a more complete understanding of a concept." In this way, Inspiration would be a great program to help visual learners (people strong in Spatial intelligence). I found the program quite easy and intuitive to use, with a good library of education-related clipart, so from a practical point of view I think it would be very easy to incorporate into the classroom.