What Is Kidspriation?
Kidspiration is a computer program aimed at grades kindergarden through fifth grade to provide support across curriculums in student learning. It is a student driven program that lets students independently explore, create, and share writing using multiple visual methods. This programs is designed to use visuals to allow students to brainstorm new ideas, organize and categorize information, create stories, and explore new ideas through thought webs and visual diagrams. Kipsiration is a great tool for building writing skills such as vocabulary and comprehension.
It is very user friendly to students starting in kindergarden. Kidspriation provides speaking interface, which is audio that is produced when scrolling over a picture or text, so that students can explore both visual and auditory learning. It also has icon representation for all the buttons, menus and text for emerging readers. These two features allow for students to independently explore writing using Kispiration.
To get started using Kidspiration, here is a link to a pdf that is kid friendly from the Inspiration website: ftp://ftp.inspiration.com/pub/pdf/ks_quick_start.pdf
For a more detailed and informative look at Kidspiration here is a video of an overview of the programs and all of its features.
Get a Free 30-Day trial of Kidspiration here: http://www.inspiration.com/Freetrial#Kidspiration
Picture View
Picture View is a tool on Kidspiration that helps students get started in the writing process by creating maps, diagrams and webs using symbols and words to tell their stories. By creating these maps, diagrams and webs students are able to put their thoughts into pictures and visually see their ideas. Picture view allows students endless options for brainstorming, organizing, and categorizing. Once the students have created their story in picture view they are then able to connect it to Writing View where their pictures will connect their visual thoughts to written expression. This is easily done by simply clicking on "go to Writing View" in the upper left hand corner of the program page. Here are some examples of how students can connect their Picture View creation to Writing View:
Writing View
Writing View is a tool on Kidspiration that students can use to expand on what they have created in Picture View to connect students visual thoughts to written expression. Writing connects the pictures that were used to tell the story in the webs, diagrams, and maps that were created and transformed into words and sentences. This process expands on the students comprehension. This tool is in the form of an outline. Within the Writing View outline, there is a lot of space provided for students to write, which encourages them to elaborate on their skills.
This example does not show it, but most of the outlines transfer the pictures used in Picture View into the outline in Writing View; some of the examples above in Picture View show this.
Using Kidspiration in the Classroom
As mentioned, Kidspiration is a great way to build literacy skills, especially writing. Here are a few examples of how to build writing by using Kidspiration in the classroom.
To apply Picture View to teach writing in your classroom for younger grades and emerging writers, you could use it to focus on having students organize their thoughts and ideas that they want to turn into a story. Do this by having students create a web in Picture View. Then give the students a topic such as "About Me". Then have the students use the symbols in the Symbol Library to add pictures around the web. Then have students add links from the picture to their main idea or topic "About Me". So many times in young children's writing there is no organization of thoughts, they start off writing about the topic and five sentences into it they are off onto a completely different topic. Creating these webs for emerging writers allows for students to gather their thoughts and organize them by linking their symbols to their main idea.
To apply Picture View to teach writing in a higher elementary classroom, you could have students focus on organizing their thoughts, but in a more advanced way than in the previous application. This time have students create a web in Picture View, but instead of having students connect their symbols to their main idea/topic, have students expand on their webs. Do this first giving students a topic such as "My Favorite Thing About School". Next have students create symbols to represent the things their favorite things about school forming a web from their main idea. After creating these symbols, explain that these are now their main points of their writing. Then have the students expand on each of those symbols creating webs from their main points or original symbols to their supporting points. This is a much more advanced web than the first application. It allows students to organize more complex thoughts into visual clusters so that when they want to transform those visuals into writing, they now have main ideas that are accompanied by supporting points.
To apply Writing View to teachh writing in the classroom, have students take their web, map, or diagram that they created in Picture View and put it into Writing View. From their, have students expand on their pictures and/or thoughts from their diagrams. They can do this by adding words to their ideas, if no words were used in Picture View, or by adding supporting thoughts to their ideas. Both of these will build on the students comprehension skills and writing skills by having students transform their visual symbols to written language.
Addional Resources for Using Kidspiration as a Teaching Tool In Your Classroom
This is a link to a pdf form of a booklet that has standard-aligned lesson plans that use Kidspiration that is called "Kidspiration in the Classroom". The lesson plans are catagorized by content and then by grade level making them easily and fastly accessible to teachers.
This is a link to an online article called "Tips for Using Kidspiration Learning Software in the Classroom" that provides advice on how to use Kidspiration most effectively as a teaching tool.
This is a link to an example of an activity teaching literacy done using Kidspiration and the book "If You Give A Mouse A Cookie". This link provides an example of the activity and a template to do the activity in your own classroom.
This is a link to a list of templates to use with Kidspiration.
This is a link that provides sample activities to do with Kidspiration.
Technical Web Links
Sources
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5-7LrDWR7g
http://www.inspiration.com/Kidspiration
http://www.atomiclearning.com/kids3pc
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