Week 3:Inspiration in the Classroom

I found the software program Inspiration to be useful for many situations, but counterproductive for some instances where more in depth thought and critical anaylsis is required. The drag and drop feature, organizational tools, and image association are interesting tools that could help teach students how to research and compile information together. Inspiration could be used in the classroom for research papers, history projects, or science experiments. I think Inspiration would be best used for history assignments, e.g. making timelines or using primary documents, and also for science to map out the experimental process. Inspiration could be effective for writing papers, but it would disadvantage the student because part of the writing process is actually writing and correlating all the information together at the end. Using Inspiration would be counterproductive in a situation where a student just collected a bunch of information and using the program, just put it all together instead of trying to write it out and make it fit together.

Writing activities such as going to the library and researching information make great use of technology. Also, in group writing activities technology is effective because it allows the students to interact with each other and compile their information into one big presentation. Technology gives students the tools, ability, and information to write all different types of essays, papers, and journals especially in this day and age.

Peer review sessions and allowing other people to read your work is the only way to effectively critique your work. Getting students to work in small groups with different people allows them to get a different perspective from each person about their paper and ways to improve it. Technology like blogging and the internet would allows students to communicate to each other what they think about a paper at different times and without having to actually be in front of the person you are critiquing. Sometimes, it is hard to give someone feedback about something they did wrong when you are right in front of their face so using technology would allow for this.