Kidspiration

After having been placed in the technology pilot classroom, I was able to witness a lot of different technology content-area tools in the classroom and one of the student favorites was Kidspiration. I was not personally familiar with this program going into this learning experience, but was amazed at how many different things the students could do and how easily they seemed to be able to use it. I asked one of the students in the class what Kidspiration is for and was told, "you know, everything." So I thought it would be better to look into the program myself so see how useful it can be in the classroom.

Looking at the website for the program, I realized my practicum student was being pretty truthful in saying Kidspiration could be used for everything. Kidspiration has programs within it for reading/writing and editing, science, math, and social studies. I had only seen the program that allows the student to create concept maps as prewriting and the program to create food webs. But there are so many more programs within Kidspiration to help students generate visual representations for a variety of concepts and content within what they are learning.

One of the most interesting was the program that has math manipulatives on the screen for the students to work with to create and begin to understand a variety of math concepts within the abstract ideas behind computing with fractions. This can be a hard topic for students, and the ability to have a program on the computer instead of/in addition to hand held manipulatives could really help foster learning with such a difficult topic.

Kidspiration is also relatively inexpensive, for a 5-computer license, the cost is $310.00. Which would be able to create at least a center in the classroom for use of the programs. Which, from the looks of it, would be highly valuable.