Inspiration+and+Discovery


 * Inspiration and Discovery (United) Streaming - Perfect Together! (Fred)**

Presenter: Jean Thorpe Affiliation: Caley School - Upper Merion School District

[|Jean's Website with Example]s

Jean is a Reading Specialist at Upper Merion and is also a Keystone Technology Integrator. She said she is not a techie, just a teacher who likes to use technology with her students. She learned this technique of using these two popular programs about a year ago and thinks it is a "cool" integration idea.

She started with an [|Inspiration] page with the words [|"Discovery Streaming"] on it. She set up a "rapid fire" session and asked folks how they used this. She typed the following: showing curriculum related videos; writing prompts; teacher resources with the videos; quizzes; making and uploading your own videos; using the "on this day in history" feature.

She then did the same type of activity with "Inspiration" itself. The following responses were solicited: brainstorming; timelines; review; writing prompts; organizing notes for research; synthesis of ideas; introduction to the mouse; flowcharting; graphic organizers; lab reports.

Lots of different ways to use both products. She learned how to take the power of the content in Discovery Streaming and brought it into Inspiration to use it to introduce a topic. She put up and example of an [|Egypt] activity program. In Discovery Streaming she found pictures she copied and pasted into an Inspiration page. Subscribers are allowed to use the content in different ways. These photographs are then used to create links to appropriate video clips, outside webpages, specific documents in pdf or .doc format etc.

There was a bit of discussion on the difference between 'streaming' a video and simply downloading it. Her district once allowed streaming and she preferred to have the link go to the streamed version. Now she has to download it and link to the downloaded version.

She showed a similar Inspiration developed around the [|Titanic] for a disaster unit done in elementary school. Now she also said a similar thing can be done using the [|Smart Notebook] software assuming your building has at least one SmartBoard mounted in it. Whether it is Inspiration or Smart - use the tools you are comfortable with.

The examples she used were single subject issues but she said it would also be a good organizational tool to have to develop one to use to conduct any entire multi-week curricular unit - essential questions, unit overviews, supplementary materials, pdf files, web quests, activities, videos, audio - everything one needs to conduct that unit in one place. Everything that goes along with that single unit is all linked together in a single Inspiration document.

There was a question on how students could access this at home. Posted on her website as it is it COULD be accessed from outside the building but the computer would have to have Inspiration on it to be able to open the file. Someone said it could be saved as a "Word" document. They went through the process and found it did come over but not with any links active. She felt that would be a good use for students to see but... Someone else felt there was a way it would go into Powerpoint and the debate continued even as the session closed.