Students can make graphic organizers like Venn diagrams,
webs, and concept maps to brain storm, organize, and create their ideas. They can
add symbols or create their own to enhance their graphic organizers. Lower
level students could use just symbols instead of text to make an organizer. The
organizers that they create can be used to create stories or help them organize
their research. When they are finished with their graphic organizers students
can switch to the word processing tool to complete their writing projects.
The math tools in Kidspiration include color tiles, pattern
blocks, base ten blocks, fraction times, and fraction boxes. These visual manipulatives
help the students grasp important math concepts. This part of the program uses visual tools for
focus on counting, place value, computation, and geometric thinking.
Kidspiration is truly a cross curricular tool. It can be
used in science to explore relationships and illustrate processes. In social
studies students can make connections between historical events or to explore the
similarities and differences of different places. These are just a few of the
possibilities
We have this tool on our school computers, but I did not
know what it was until after I learned about it in a class this summer. I look forward
to using it with my students this year to create graphic organizers for writing
stories and for organizing research project information. A disadvantage of this tool is that you can
try it free for 30 days but after that you have to pay to use the program. Another
drawback is that Kidspiration is geared towards elementary students (K-5). The
program Inspiration is for
students in grades 6-12.
This is a tool that I need to become more familiar with, as it is one a lot of our student computers in our district. However, I am fluent with some other graphic organizer programs like SMART Ideas and Popplet. So this begs the question, as teachers, do we need to be familiar with all the tools that our students use, even if there are others that serve the same function?
ReplyDeleteI am so happy you posted about Kidspiration! I had worked in small groups with students last year who were using this to begin a social studies project and had forgotten the name, after working with my students to create webs for brainstorming writing their personal narratives I couldn't remember the name of this program and wished I had had it at the time! The program works great in just about every subject, and the nice thing is that it helps use different aspects of literacy in their organization as well (we had focused on types of details (sensory, action, emotion) which would would have worked wonderful with this program. As I said before, I was impressed when I saw it used last year during a 3rd grade social studies project and it would work great for science as well (we just wrapped up our unit on the scientific method, which I could have used this as well with!).
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