I researched and tried out KIDspiration, a version of the popular Inspiration software that has been designed specifically for students in grades kindergarten through fifth grade. 30 day free trials of both are available online if you click here. I came across KIDspiration online and was immediately drawn to it; the site described it as "the visual way to explore and understand words, numbers, and concepts by engaging students in a visual cross-curricular workspace". My sister had used Inspiration to create story boards and brainstorm for papers when she was in middle school, so I decided to try KIDspiration out.
I am not yet teaching, so I was unable to try this software out in a classroom. However, after downloading the trial and playing around with it, it's obvious that it has a lot of potential to be great tool when I am teaching. KIDspiration would allow my students to have the reinforcement of both pictures and words when learning new concepts. It also builds on previous knowledge by helping kids define relationships between items they have learned about or adding a visual element to further explain difficult mathematical concepts like place value or geometry.
One of the ways I would use this in an elementary school classroom would be when teaching a lesson on animal classification. In KIDspiration, I would ask students to build a graphic organizer or concept map to organize the information they had learned and collected about types of animals. KIDspiration could assist me in helping them understand these types of scientific concepts, as well as relate new information to previous knowledge. In the Picture View, students can either add symbols by searching pictures already loaded into the program or personalize their concept map by drawing their own using the Symbol Maker tool. I was worried at first that some of my younger students might not be computer savvy enough or have high enough reading levels to take on this kind of activity, but all of the buttons and menus are represented with easy to interpret icons and the computer says the word that goes with the icon that is clicked for further vocabulary/reading development.
I could also use KIDspiration's Picture and Interactive Writing Views to have the "Student of the Month" create and print an "about me" page, give students another way to brainstorm for writing pieces, or analyze books we read as a class. Once students create something in the software, they can export that work to the web or even finalize and print it in a word processor like Microsoft Word. KIDspiration's only downside is that I might have difficulty getting the program placed on school computers after the 30 day trial runs out. I would also need to be careful to use it as a supplement to my lessons, rather than relying on it too heavily. Overall, I'm excited to have discovered it and can't wait to try it out on some K-5 kiddos!
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