Week 3 Discussion

Inspiration looks like a great program for students to use when writing papers. It helps students get started, organize their thoughts, and visualize their ideas. In addition, it looks very user-friendly and easy to teach the students how to use it. The most interesting aspect is the ability to switch to the outline view, which is created for you when you design the concept map of your information, and any editing done in the outline view is automatically transferred to the map view. In my classroom, I would most likely use Inspiration when the students are required to write research papers.

In my classroom, I would probably have the students use the Writely program for collaborative writing when working on group science projects. This would enable the students to import their research information and then compose and edit their documents. Once they have created a rough draft, they could send it to me for high-quality feedback or to another group of students for peer review. Since I will most likely be teaching high school students, I could save my teaching time by allowing the students to use blog posting on the internet for peer review.

The first time I taught math, I felt like I knew the material pretty well. However, explaining it to very young students on their level was much harder than I thought it would be. After teaching the concept of multiplication facts several times, I definitely felt like I had a better understanding.