Explain this
Inspiration 8
How the publisher describes it:
“Brainstorm ideas, structure your thoughts and visually communicate concepts with the Diagram and Map Views. Organise information and structure writing for plans, essays and reports, using the integrated Outline View. With Inspiration's Presentation Manager transform your diagrams, mind maps and outlines into polished, clear presentations.”
Review by Steve Bishop
In brief:
Inspiration is a powerful piece of software that enables visual diagrams, mindmaps and concept maps to be drawn, modified and saved on a computer.
“Those who like using concept maps and mindmaps in their teaching will love it!”
Mindmaps first used by Porphyry of Tyros in the third century and now popularised and packaged by Tony Buzan have become popular in education. They have been a wonderful excuse for students to get out their colouring crayons, until now: Inspiration is a powerful piece of software that enables visual diagrams, mindmaps and concept maps to be drawn, modified and saved on a computer.
Visual diagrams drawn can easily be converted into an outline format, a hierarchical structure of the ideas. This can provide the outline for written documents.
Inspiration 8 is a real improvement over previous editions; it now has a facility to draw mind maps as well as the usual visual diagrams. It also has a Word Guide facility, which gives a definition, synonyms, antonyms and other related words.
The new version also has a drag and drop facility and video and sound integration. It is also compatible with interactive whiteboards.
It is easy to use and students can pick it up in a few minutes (for teachers it may take a little longer!). Drawing the visual diagrams is relatively straightforward. It involves a click of the mouse and then the entering in the words and a choice of image where appropriate. A useful 80-page booklet on getting started comes with the package and there are on-line video tutorials that are easily accessible.
The finished documents can be printed, saved to a word processor (either Word or Apple works), as a PowerPoint, a web page or as a graphic (gif, jpeg, bmp or wmf). The program is compatible with Windows 98 onwards and with Mac OX X 910.15 or higher).
There is a large clip art library of images that can be used, however the mathematics images are rather limited. There are a few polygons, a few three-dimensional shapes and then a file of basic mathematical symbols. I hope that future versions Inspiration will improve on this and offer a wider range of mathematical images. There is however, a search facility which enables Inspiration to connect to the Internet and find (it claims) more than a million additional symbols and images. I found a stem and leaf plots but no boxplots or cumulative frequency curves. Images can be downloaded from the Internet and pasted onto the map.
Overall, it is an excellent package - particularly for Humanities and Science students. Those who like using concept maps and mindmaps in their teaching will love it! It is well worth upgrading from Inspiration 7 to access the mindmap and Word Guide facilities.
Steve Bishop • Mathematics lecturer, City of Bristol College
£68.15
