Inspiration 8.0 New Features

Powered by the proven strategies of visual learning, Inspiration® 8 provides more ways to inspire learning success across the curriculum. The new and enhanced capabilities—including Inspiration Web Resources—make Inspiration the essential learning tool to help students visualize, think, organize and learn.

More ways to engage and learn visually Keyword search for symbols Quickly find symbols to better express ideas and represent concepts by searching with keywords. Inspiration provides more than 1,000 symbols, plus access to more than 1 million additional symbols through Inspiration Web Resources. Video and sound integration Use multimedia to create more engaging and informative projects. Students insert and play video and sound such as QuickTime® movies and MP3 files right in Inspiration. Jumpstart assignments, gather research easily and streamline projects Inspiring templates Start projects quickly with templates that offer frameworks for gathering information and organizing ideas. Choose from 65 enhanced templates that cover language arts, science, social studies, thinking skills and planning topics. More than 60 additional templates are available through Inspiration Web Resources. Drag-and-drop Gather research and enhance projects with familiar drag-and-drop actions. Enhanced capabilities make it easy for students to automatically hyperlink to URLs plus quickly add text, images and multimedia files from other sources to their Inspiration projects. Enhanced export and transfer Easily and efficiently turn Inspiration documents into robust final projects with new export and transfer capabilities. New options in the Site Skeleton® export let students incorporate symbols, video and sound in web pages. With added transfer options, students can choose just the information they need to finalize assignments in their favorite word processor. Write with more clarity and accuracy Word Guide Write with clarity and build vocabulary using the Word Guide, an innovative dictionary and thesaurus. Information—including parts of speech, definitions and synonyms—is displayed in a familiar way to help students quickly find and choose words with precision. Auto spell checker Improve spelling skills and streamline the writing and revision process with a contextual spell checker. Misspelled words are automatically identified in both the Diagram and Outline Views so students can quickly correct errors. Get more visual learning power with Inspiration Web Resources Use Inspiration with an Internet connection to seamlessly access these additional complimentary resources: More than 1 million symbols Students better demonstrate their understanding and communicate their ideas by including symbols in their projects. An online Inspiration symbol collection, containing more than 1 million illustrations and photographs, offers safe image choices for any topic. 50+ Curriculum Packets Curriculum Packets help teachers effectively integrate visual learning techniques as they address multiple learning styles. Each comprehensive online Curriculum Packet provides an integrated unit plan with multiple templates and exemplars. Plus, each of the 50+ Curriculum Packets offers standards-aligned supplemental instructional units for high-school level language arts, social studies or science. Access learning standards, classroom applications and templates with exemplars of student work. On-demand training videos Learn how to use Inspiration and complete projects efficiently with on-demand training videos. These online videos cover Inspiration's commonly used features. Additional ease-of-use Inspiration Starter screen Quickly begin projects or access training and teaching resources from the Inspiration Starter screen. AutoArrange Organize ideas effortlessly with AutoArrange. Students more efficiently add content and develop their projects, using AutoArrange to automatically format their diagrams as they work. Brainstorming Capture ideas quickly with the enhanced RapidFire® tool. Students choose to add ideas that link automatically to a symbol or to add unconnected ideas that they can later associate and link. Custom symbol libraries Help students focus on learning by providing symbols specific to their assignments. Using Inspiration's Template Wizard, custom symbol libraries can be saved and shared with template files or teachers can limit student access to symbol libraries.