What's your Inspiration?

Inspiration is a great software for classrooms. Not only can a teacher or student create graphic organizers to represent a concept in the course of study, but also he can also move that concept map into Word and make it even more productive from there. I think it is an awesome tool and I would definitely invest in it for my classroom. As a social studies teacher, I am always looking for visual stimuli to keep my students interested and excited about learning. Additionally, as a future secondary education teacher and hopefully grades 9-12, I like to keep things challenging and enriching in the classroom. I believe that Inspiration helps me to accomplish both of those tasks.

That being said, here a few ideas of how I would like to incorporate Inspiration into my classroom.
1. Trace the causes of wars: specifically WWI and WWII
2. Explaining the branches of government
3. Describing the process of how a bill becomes a law
4. Explaining the characteristics of the multiple types of government
5. Explaining the U.S. system of checks and balances
6. Describing the phases of the French Revolution
7. Explaining the American Electoral system for the presidential election
8. Explaining the foreign, domestic and monetary policies of a particular president
9. Describing the three major world religions and their basic tenants/principles
10. Explaining the Circular Flow Model of Economics
11. Explaining the political spectrum in a particular era of history


In class, the web resources we have used have all been extremely helpful. In the past, I have found multiple resources to use but not some of the great databases that were introduced in class. My favorite are the NCLOR and UnitedStreaming. Once again, as a social studies teacher who may use several power points throughout my teaching it is great to be able to illustrate a point through a video clip. Unitedstreaming has a wealth of videos at hand that may be accessed and I plan on using them a lot both to stream and download. They also have links to PBS videos which is also wonderful and Frontline documentaries are one of my favorite sets of historical and informational classroom videos. My teachers in higher level classes showed them often and I plan to use them myself to add life to my classroom.

As for NCLOR, I absolutely love it. I found sites such as historyanimated.com from it that animates the movements and progression of troops in almost all majors wars in history. Also, from NCLOR, I found a huge multitude of lesson plans and classroom resources. The maps are found are phenomenal as well. I know that with these resources at hand, I can become an even greater teacher and add technological life to my classroom!