Inspiration

Wow the inspiration program is incredible,I was amazed at all you can do on it, and how it will be very helpful in the classroom. The programs comes with diagrams, maps, outlines, and presentation manager its really a handing program to have around. I was really amazed on how you could brainstorms ideas on the diagram and as your doing that add ideas to your main idea and add extra ideas to your ideas, while at the same time as your doing all the it's making an outline for you on its own. Then after you are done with everything on your diagram you could switch all your info over to the presentation manager and present it to the class. 

Being a Spanish teacher in the future I'm probably going to have my students doing a lot of presentations in Spanish so my students would defiantly be using the Microsoft Power Point and Inspiration Presentation Manager to present the assignments. They could use the maps or the diagrams on the Inspiration site to help the brain storm and organize papers and presentations for the assignments from my class. For the papers of course Microsoft Word would be the best way for the students to turn in their written assignments to me. I  also could have a contest to see who writes the best paper and the winner would be able to  publish their writings on Kidscripe. "Recent research has shown that student-to-student feedback may be more effective in helping students improve in their writing than the "expert" feedback they may receive from teachers". Therefore; the best way for students to help themselves during writing would probably be Blog. Students could then post their papers up on blog and fellow classmates could comment on the post and give ideas and opinions about the paper. They could also use SWoRD a web based reciprocal peer review system to get feed back over their work. This way it could take a burden off my hands being as I won't always have the time to give feed back to all my students over their work. As a teacher sometimes we are going to get topics we will not know as well as others but you may find out that as you go through and continue to teach on the topic you become aware that the more and more you teach it the better and more informed of the topic you become. As was the situation with me when I was teaching a friend of mine a workout routine that I had barely stated the week before I didn't really know much about it at the beginning but as I went on continuing the workout and teaching him as well. I became more aware of what I was doing while also at the same time  learn more about it and was better prepare to teach it next time.

It seems technology is helping a lot these days not only in the classrooms but in the world itself, I'm excited to start using some of these programs in my curriculum, and apply them to my everyday life as well. I believe technology will make my teaching career a little easier and it will also provide me with a lot of fun ways to get my lecture out to the students. 

Inspiration Videos and Webcasts for Using Visual Learning In Your Classroom. (2010). Retrieved September 13, 2010, from Inspiration Software, Inc.: http://www.inspiration.com/videos/Inspiration

Jonassen, D. H. (2008). Meaningful Learning With Technology (Third Edition ed.). Upper Saddle River: Pearson Prentice Hall.