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Good afternoon everybody. Welcome to today's webinar. Today we are going to talk about
the app Inspiration. Many of you are probably familiar with the software Inspiration. It
is a popular concept mapping tool to help students kind of visually lay out a paper
before they go ahead and write it. It helps with lots of students with disabilities that
have trouble with organizing things, or organizing their thoughts before writing papers. We're
going to take a look at that app. Here is it right here on our screen. If I open that
app up, you can get a chance to see what Inspiration looks like. Here is the main page within Inspiration.
Inspiration is a $10.00 app. They also have a free version. I believe with the free version
you cannot use some of the templates. You may not be able to use any of the templates
in fact, but the $10.00 version you've got free reign to work with anything you want
in here.
You can see we've got these two examples here are things that I have created. If we look
over here, these are the templates that are available to us. So if I go and hit templates
you can see there are lots of different options here. There is a new blank diagram, English
analogy, character analysis, book or film comparison, biography. They lay this out so
that there are lots of different premade templates that you can use and plug your information
into. If you choose one of these, this is what it is going to look like, and I have
pre-done one so we can take a look at how this plays out. We did a biography one. We
will tap on my biography option here, and it is going to open up my biography outline
of George Washington.
These were all blank when we plugged it in here. Actually, these colored ones are laid
out this way more facts about him, an historical backdrop, background influence, obstacles,
and historical impact. You can go in and plug in things that would fit underneath these.
Facts about him: the First President. We go and we tap on that gray one next to the First
President and hold or double tap on it. We can say one the one dollar bill and we can
continue to add things from there. We could also add if you look down toward the bottom
of this screen we have added notes to some of these as well. Under those notes, the immediate
effect of obstacles, the immediate effect obstacles defeating the British. Long term
effect in birth of a nation here. If we wanted to add something to First President, we can
tap and hold on First President, and you are going to just tap on First President.
What you are going to see is a little box that pops up above it that has like, a pencil
writing on a notepad. If you we tap on that we can type in something like served two terms
and then X out of that, and we will have that attached here. You can see that that little
icon changed to kind of a bubble that has our information attached to that. If we wanted
to add something else some other facts like chopped down a cherry tree or something like
that, at the facts button we can tap on that, and you are going to see a little dotted line
arrow coming out of that. If we tap that, it is going to add another fact box for us
and here it is. So we can double tap in there and say chopped down a cherry tree. This is
not the best essay on George Washington but you get the concept. If we wanted to get that
in line with the rest of our stuff, we can just grab that and slide it over with our
other facts.
You can see now there are arrows coming off of facts to the different boxes that would
be attached to facts, historical facts, and background and so forth. So that is how we
would use a template to go ahead and create this concept map. What is cool about this
now is we have the concept map. If we want this to be converted into an outline format,
we can come up here to the top left and tap this button that's got the different lines
on it. If we tap on that, we will see the screen flip around, and now we've got an outline
format here that we can work with. With our outline format, we can change text size of
this. If we selected a line and then we come up over here where you see those three keys
and hit those, that will change the text size. There are three different sizes small, medium,
and large with that, and we can change those text sizes to whatever level we need to be
able to see.
What is really nice about these outlines is once we have done the outlines you can see
we've got everything in our outline here. If you want to use this to begin writing,
we can actually send this outline to another app that has a word processing component to
it, and we do that through this little box with an arrow coming out of it if we tap on
that. We can print it, we can email it, we can set it in Dropbox or iTunes, but here
we can hit send to app, and then we can choose if we want to send it as a pdf or as text.
Let's use text and then here's the apps that I have available that I can send it to -- Voice
Stream, Text Help, I Read Write. I'm going to go all the way over to the side here, and
I'm going to send it to I Word Q, which has a word prediction component to it. So you
can see now this is in I Word Q and I can go ahead and I can write within this if I
wanted to.
Let me go back into Inspiration because I want to continue to show you some other things
we can do with this. I'm going to hit the home button and head back to my main page,
and we can see here now I have a blank kind of document, or a blank template on the University
of Iowa. I wanted to show you how you can personalize your templates as well. If I want
to write about the University of Iowa, my main topic is the University of Iowa, I want
to move that right to the middle. If I want to add say three things about the university
I want to talk about sports, I want to talk about medicine, and I want to talk about education.
I'm going to hit that arrow button, and it is going to give me another bubble. I can
double tap in that bubble and we will type in sports. Now because this is not a main
topic I may want to change the shape of that bubble as well.
To change the shape -- this is kind of maybe confusing part of this -- I'm going to highlight
that bubble, and I'm going to come up here to the I. I'm going to press the I and you
can see now I can choose style, I can choose shape, text, and diagram up across the top.
I'm going to choose shape. From that shape let's make it a rectangle. So we will choose
rectangle, and then we tap back in here or tap the I again and that should take it away
and you will see sports is setup as a rectangle. Again, if I want to add more to this, let's
just add a couple more. Tap here and hit another arrow we will move more toward the center.
We will double tap and we will call this education. We will come back to our main idea and tap
the little arrow again, and move this over here, double tap and call it Medicine. Okay.
So now I probably should change my sports or my education in medicine bubble.
So again we will highlight education, tap the I, tap shape and choose rectangle, and
then we will do the same thing. We will leave that open. We will tap the oval for medicine
and tap rectangle, and now we've got different shapes here. We can change the color of those
if we wanted to, and we would do that under style. So you can see the fill color, and
we will just change education to a yellow. So you can see how that would change. If I
wanted to continue going here, we could add for sports let's add football for now. For
education let's add [inaudible]. For medicine let's go ahead and add UI Hospital. UIHC,
UI Hospitals and Clinics. So now we've got a nice little web here. You can see we can
move these things around by just grabbing and sliding. The other thing that we can do
to personalize this is we can add pictures directly to this if we wanted to also.
So if I wanted to add a picture for the University of Iowa in just this bubble, I can tap on
this, and then I can go tap that I, and if I go to shape and scroll down in the very
bottom we've got two picture options. So, the one with the camera opens up our camera.
The one with the flower and a box opens up our pictures. So if we have a picture saves
like I do I can tap that, have access to my camera roll, and I can go ahead and choose
the University of Iowa's logo and it has gone ahead and made that change to everything that
I had set as active. I do not want that to be the hospital's option, so I'm going to
go back to the hospital I'm going to hit that flower again, and I have a picture of the
whole hospital complex I will choose. For education I will choose ICATER, hit that flower
again, and I think I have a picture of I-Cater somewhere in here. There is our I-Cater lab.
For football we will go ahead and do that again and I will highlight [inaudible] and
we can't do too many things. We want to uncheck the ones we do not want to use. We just want
to use football, and I would choose the picture, and I'm going to go ahead and put Kinnick
Stadium where the Hawkeyes play. We will [inaudible] and we will put our hospital picture back
in there as well. So you can see now instead of just having those bubbles we have gone
ahead and we have created something that might be more visually appealing where we are actually
using pictures that they have saved on their iPad to create this outlines for it. So again
you can change styles with this. You can change the width of lines. You can change the fill
color. You can change text. You can change the font. You can bold, italicize text if
you want to.
You can change the size of the text. So if we crank up the size of football there you
can see that is bigger. You can change the color of the text. Within the diagram you
can change what everything looks like here the link lines, the background color. So maybe
we will make that gold for Iowa, the background texture, lots that we can change. But really
what this all boils down to is you are creating these concept maps of your paper that you
want to write, and then from there you have an outline. You have this in an outline format
that you can then go through and follow and be able to organize your writing. Overall
this is a really nice app. Again the only thing that is somewhat confusing would be
how you would change shapes, how you would change colors, and that is all done through
that little eye right there.
If you want to delete something, you hit the garbage can, and you go back to the homepage
and you can get hit edit and you can get rid of things here. If you do hit the plus key,
then you can choose whether or not you want to add a new diagram or a new outline to what
you are doing as well. Overall again this is a really nice app. You can view this if
you want to learn more about this, if you want to view other app webinars that we have
done, you can view those by downloading the I-Cater toolkit from the app store. It is
free and you can watch everything there. Or you can also [ended abruptly]