Lesson 2
How to use Inspiration for Research

Objective: Students will learn how to build an electronic graphic organizer to hold information for a research project. Students will present, in written language, their opinions and judgments on experiences, ideas, information and issues related to the slave narratives.

Materials:
--Computer with Internet connection and Inspiration software.
--Projector to project website and Inspiration demo.
Inspiration website for information and tutorials:
http://inspiration.com

Procedures:
The two main skills learned in this lesson are copying and pasting and toggling between applications.
1. Open Inspiration using the projector.
2. We are now going to use Inspiration to help us organize our exploration of slavery in the United States in the time of the Civil War, as experienced through the life of one person who was a slave.
3. Open the website http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/wpa/wpahome.html
4. Open Inspiration
5. Under the View menu, turn on show page lines. This is important in establishing the margins of what will fit on one printed page.
6. Go to the website and click to the person you have chosen. Assuming that the student has already chosen the person and read the interview with the person, we are first going to copy and paste the person’s name into the center (main idea symbol) of the Inspiration web. Highlight the person’s name. Edit>copy.
7. By using the appropriate means for your operating system, demonstrate toggling to Inspiration. Click in the center symbol/main idea and Edit>paste.
8. Now toggle back to the website and find an interesting short quote from the interview and highlight it. Discuss how it was decided to highlight the amount of text chosen. What is too much text? What is too little? Edit>copy.
9. Toggle back to Inspiration and generate a new symbol in any way and click in the symbol, Edit>paste to paste the quote from the interview into the symbol.
10. Discuss why you chose this quote to include in the web. Respond to the quote by linking another symbol and in that symbol entering the reason the quote was interesting to you.
11. Cite the website URL as the source of the quote. Use the note feature of Inspiration to do this or create a linked symbol to hold this information.
Additional Resource: for creating citations- http://noodletools.com/quickcite/

Optional discussion: What are the different ways that we can note the sources of information that we are including in the web. Possible options may include a key on the page, a type of graphic symbol as a key to the source of the information, using the note feature in Inspiration.

Assessment: Can students copy and paste information from a website into an Inspiration web? Can students toggle back and forth between applications? Can students make judgments about what will fit on a page when printed or viewed as one page and adjust the amount of text highlighted to make sense for the page size?