Kidspiration

This week I played around with the tool called Kidspiration. I had no idea what it was or how it was to be used. After playing with it for about 5 minutes I fell absolutely in love with it! Now I wish I had it at home.

Kidspiration is a tool that lets you make activities on the computer for students to accomplish. Without knowing the system that part was kind of confusing. So I went to the activities portion of this tool first, just to get the hang of things. The first activity I clicked into was a word activity called beginning or end. I didn't want to get too confused so I figured out what everything on the tool bar did. I love that this program allows kids to create diagrams of all different kinds to accomplish whatever the task may be. I also love that the undo button is very prominent in case you make a mistake. Listen is a handy tool so you can hear the instructions and how to do the assignment, and a dictionary and thesaurus is always handy. So before I even looked at any activities I was very impressed.

There were a few activities I really loved that I want to highlight. (I'm sure I would have many more if I had more time to explore the tool.) The first one I loved is called Balanced Meal. In this activity kids have to drag pictures of different foods and put them in the right food group. Then they have to decide which ones could go together to make a healthy meal. The set up was darling and the whole thing very fun to do. The second one I thought would be very useful was called Branches of Government. There were phrases or names in boxes that students had to sort into the 3 branches of government. I always get confused about who is where in the government and this activity would help me remember a little bit better. Get Ready is another really fun activity. There are 5 kids that need to get ready for different events and it was my job to get them dressed correctly. Talk about fun! Paper dolls on the computer :) Another one I liked was called Basic Heredity. Students are asked to sort environmental traits from inherited traits . After they are sorted they g to the writing view and explain the choice they made for each symbol and why.

I found this tool very fun and helpful as well. I think many students would enjoy learning how to play on here. The biggest benefit is that children would be learning so much and think of it as play because of how the program is set up. Not only will they learn many different subjects and work on all skills, they will better their technology skills as well. I found the program to be very easy to navigate and control. I think students of all ages could use Kidspiration even at young ages. Children in K-3 might need a teachers or parents help and the older kids could do it all on their own.

It may be hard to have Kidspiration in the classroom because I think students would want to play on it all the time. Most classrooms don't have enough computers for each student to use at the same time. There would be draw backs such as each child couldn't get enough time on the computer to accomplish an assignment in expected time. Homework with Kidspiration would also be difficult for those children without a computer at home. These obstacles can be solved, I'm sure. Maybe Kidspiration could be used just once a week in the school computer lab. Each child would have that time to complete an activity and get to know the program.

I think Kidspiration could be a wonderful tool for each student to be familiar with. I would love to have it in my school's computer lab someday. I need to be more familiar with the program before I teach students so I hope to have enough time to do that. Overall, I love Kidspiration and plan to use it in the future!