Resources to Help You Integrate Inspiration® Across the Curriculum
Related Technologies and Services
Lesson Plan Books
Textbook Connections
Related Technologies and Services
Print poster-sized Inspiration 9 documents to engage collaborative and whole-class visual learning with the VariQuest™ Poster Maker. Optimized to work together, Inspiration and the VariQuest Poster Maker allow you to seamlessly enlarge, print and display Inspiration's Diagram, Map and Outline View documents to:
- Show relationships between ideas to explain concepts
- Jumpstart brainstorming
- Clearly communicate assignment and classroom expectations
- And more!
Inspiration 9.0a is compatible with both the VariQuest Plus 3000 and the Poster Maker 3600. More information on VariQuest Visual Learning Tools.
Inspiration Software and VariQuest share a passion for visual thinking and learning. Teachers use the technologies together to diagram and display assignment instructions, show work examples, post an outline of rules, and in other creative ways. Students complete assignments using Inspiration and make class presentations using the posters as visual aids.
Sublime Learning™ delivers professional learning designed to unleash the instructional power of Kidspiration® and Inspiration®. Their unique offering integrates effective teaching strategies with expertise on innovative use of Kidspiration® and Inspiration®. Beyond how-to, they focus on using technology to achieve K-12 instructional goals for reading, writing, math and thinking skills across the curriculum. To move from ideas to classroom practice, Sublime employs professional learning best practices, and instructors provide foundational knowledge, models, practice and feedback over time.
Educators complete Sublime Learning programs with a better understanding of how to use Inspiration and Kidspiration to encourage creative and critical thinking, increase differentiated instruction, and engage students more deeply in their own learning process.
Atomic Learning is dedicated to providing educational resources that allow teachers, students and learners of all ages to embrace technology. Their short, easy-to-view-and-understand online tutorials are a great anytime/anywhere resource for answers to those "How do I do that?" questions. Click here for more information and to browse Atomic Learning's online library of Inspiration tutorials.
The Promethean ACTIV board provides the most powerful solution available when you want to capture or present ideas using Kidspiration in front of a whole group of students. Optimized for use on Promethean ACTIV boards, Kidspiration now includes shape and handwriting recognition making it easy to create graphic organizers by sketching symbols and links and writing text directly on the ACTIV board. Users are also able to move toolbars to the bottom of the ACTIV board screen for easy access by all students. When Kidspiration is used in conjunction with Promethean's software and ACTIVote system, users benefit from a fully embedded student response system - allowing the teacher to ask questions and collect feedback from every student on the fly and even paste the results as a chart into Kidspiration itself. Click here for more information.
Inspiration® for Nova5000
The handheld version of Inspiration runs on Fourier System's Nova5000, a student learning appliance designed to fill the space between handheld devices and laptops, and is bundled with every Nova5000 purchase. Click here to learn more about the Nova5000.
Lesson Plan Books
Standards-based teacher lesson plan books make it easy to integrate Inspiration® and visual thinking and learning across the curriculum. Teachers get practical ideas and step-by-step directions for engaging students in activities that encourage learning, thinking and creativity.
Inspiration 8:
The Thinking Classroom: Using Inspiration to Meet Curriculum Standards
Designed to support teachers as they help students develop their critical thinking strategies, each of the book's six sections includes an overview of a key cognitive strategy and its application in the major curriculum areas of language arts, science and social studies. This innovative teacher resource book takes a new approach by offering in-depth explanations of visual learning's role in mastering fundamental critical thinking skills:
- Determining cause and effect
- Making comparison
- Decoding ideas
- Generating questions
- Evaluating information
- Testing one's knowledge
Each of the six sections of the book provides teachers with a summary of a specific cognitive strategy, examples of templates and diagrams that students can use to apply the strategy to a wide-range of topics, and finally a sample lesson of the thinking skill in language arts, social studies and science. Lesson plans for each subject area provide all the information teachers need to model a thinking skill and help their students practice the strategy.
View sample pages from The Thinking Classroom.
To view this file you may need to install Adobe® Reader®.
Inspiration 8:
The Readers’ Handbook Integration Guide for Inspiration
Inspiration Software has developed with Great Source a resource that supports the use of Inspiration with the Reader's Handbook for grades 6-8. The Reader's Handbook Integration Guide for Inspiration helps teachers get the most out of these two classroom tools and provides strategies for teaching reading and comprehension across the curriculum.
The user-friendly Reader's Handbook Integration Guide contains step-by-step instructions on how to use Inspiration and the Reader's Handbook to customize instruction, assess student progress and develop students' reading proficiency. It also comes with a CD-Rom full of Inspiration graphic organizer templates which support the guide's lessons and activities, as well as a fully-functioning 30-day trial of Inspiration.
For ordering information and further details, visit the Inspiration Software online store. The Readers' Handbook Integration Guide for Inspiration was designed to be used with Inspiation 8.
Textbook Connections
Many leading education textbook publishers have chosen graphic organizers as a core strategy to improve learning outcomes. They use graphic organizers within textbooks to present new information and concepts, and they give recommendations on how to use graphic organizers with student activities in their teacher guides and classroom materials.
Inspiration Software collaborates with publishers to provide materials that make it easy to effectively integrate Inspiration with the following textbooks:
Strategies for Writers, levels F-H
Zaner-Bloser
Grades 6-8/Writing
Download Inspiration 8 templates to use with activities and projects found in Zaner-Bloser's Strategies for Writers' textbooks and notebooks. Using these graphic organizers with process writing will help your students systematically and confidently plan and organize their writing in five critical modes: Narrative, descriptive, expository, persuasive and test writing.
To use these templates, you must have Inspiration. To download a free 30-day trial of Inspiration, click here.
Click on your textbook to access the templates:
Level F, Grade 6
Level G, Grade 7
Level H, Grade 8
High Point Series
Hampton-Brown
Grades 6-12
Hampton-Brown recommends using Inspiration in conjunction with its High Point Series' lesson plans. The High Point Series is a standards-based language arts program for grades 6 and up, offering relevant themes, motivating literature, content connections and specialized strategies for English-language learners and struggling readers. Using Inspiration, students develop vocabulary and writing skills by building graphic organizers as part of the lesson plans.
