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Inspiration comes to the web: meet MyWebspiration.com!
21 CommentsGood morning everyone!
Though I missed yesterday’s NJAET conference, I was able (thanks to the web) to follow along virtually with several presentations, including this one: “21 “Must See” Web 2.0 Websites for Educators.” It was presented by my friends Lisa Thumann, Sr. Specialist in Technology Education, CMSCE, Rutgers University, and Heather Sullivan, Technology Facilitator, Freehold Regional High School District.
I posted earlier this month about online collaborative drawing/brainstorming tools, and hadn’t heard of http://mywebspiration.com/ yet. Yes, the 1,000-pound gorilla, Inspiration Software, has finally entered the room, and if I were one of the web 2.0 upstarts in this market segment, I’d be concerned. Or would I…?
Registration for the beta is free, so sign up soon. The process is simple, and once you’re in, you’re greeted with the familiar Inspiration software UI:
And here is the workspace, virtually identical to the current product:
Collaboration is key to any online tool, and Webspiration allows you to collaborate with anyone that has an email address (strike #1 for widespread K-12 use…)
Email invitations include links to create a profile on MyWebspiration.com, certainly a reasonable approach and the same one taken by many similar programs. Perhaps the good folks at Inspiration are developing an administrative front end to allow schools to easily create and manage user accounts, particularly for those under 13, since currently, you can’t even create an account if you declare you are not a teenager when registering.
Once inside, you’ve got all the usual Inspriation goodness, with the terrific symbol sets, formatting tools, RapidFire (though it didn’t seem to work for me exactly the way it does with the regular version of Inspiration), plus revision history, and the ability to import documents directly from Inspiration 8 (but not prior versions, hmmmmmm.)
Overall this looks like a VERY viable tool, easily the most powerful visual thinking tool available on the web, though in my view it’s best suited to adult users (or at least those with email addresses, over the age of 13). Getting information OUT of the program looks to be a bit of a challenge, though, as the only ‘save as’ capability is Inspiration 8 format (double hmmmmmm.) Clearly this is a beta product that will improve with input from early users, and it’s very well built. Only time will tell how far they will go in terms of embracing the nature and essence of web 2.0, building in easy of user account controls and exporting/saving to different formats, in particular. But don’t listen to me, check out http://mywebspiration.com/ yourself today!
Hope this helps,
-kj-
Published on October 15, 2008 · Filed under: Visual Thinking;
21 Responses to “Inspiration comes to the web: meet MyWebspiration.com!”
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Thanks for this. It looks great. I will have to check it out.
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Hi Penny! Thanks for commenting. Let us know what you think! -kj-
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Thanks for posting this. I worked on a project for at least an hour and I was amazed about how stable it was. I also noticed that the only way to really print or save offline was to save as an Inspiration file. I’ve always thought that Inspiration was the most significant software for education and the online version is great!
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I have had problems getting it to load on my Firefox 3.0.3, but it works great so far on IE 7 (once I updated my Flash Player) and Google Chrome.
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Nadine,
Thanks for the comment and observation – I’d missed that crucial part about saving. We don’t have Inspiration 8 in my district. Triple hmmmmm…
Vinnie,
Thanks for the reminder – I’m off to update my Flash Player as well, it’s been buggy!
-kj-
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Yes, Keith, but Inspiration has always allowed a free 30 day trial per system, so I have always been able to get around the file type limitation.
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Hey Vinnie, not sure I follow, do you mean you just download the trial every time you need to convert a file? Errrrmmmm…
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Maureen Tumenas said on October 15th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
I love Inspiration- haven’t upgraded from 7.5 in the lab yet. What this tool is lacking is an export- save as jpeg or embed. I had my 7th and 8th graders make concept maps this year and told them they could use any tool they wished. A few ventured out and tried a few from my list of web 2.0 tools, but most stuck with good old Inspiration. The challenge came when they were to post them to our ning. The jpegs looked terrible. I ended up putting them in a voice thread where you can zoom in and out. If a tool is a viable web 2.0 tool- you should not have to print it- it should be shareable- and not lose the excellent quality inspiration offers to print users.
Hoping for more from this app in the future.
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Hi Maureen,
I tend to agree. After thinking more about this and playing with it, the app seems like more of a “web front end” to Inspiration 8 than a standalone program. That makes sense in some ways since it would seem illogical for Inspiration to develop a free, web-based program to cannibalize it’s market-leading product. I agree, this is a wait-and-see situation!
-kj-
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I’m Don Helfgott, CEO and co-founder of Inspiration Software. Thank you for reviewing our newly released beta version of Webspiration. We plan on releasing new features about once a month. Friday we will release our next version which will include a new “chat” feature. Since this is a web application the new feature will just “magically” appear (no install required!).
You can currently print Webspiration documents from within Webspiration by choosing “Print” from the Document menu.
Soon we will be adding new ways to export and share Webspiration documents.
Please stay tuned to see periodic improvements as Webspiration is a work in progress…
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Hello Don,
Thanks for commenting, and for pointing out the Document | Print capability. Not sure how we missed that, shame on us! :/ We’re anxiously waiting to see what features you add next. Chat is a good idea, but printing/saving to other formats, particularly images and HTML, would be HUGE!
Good luck with the new product,
-kj-
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Kevin:
Webspiration now has a “Publish” feature which allows a Webspiration user to publish their document to the internet. Published documents may be accessed by a URL (that Webspiration can email to you.) or embedded in another web page.
Here’s an example from Brian Friedlander’s blog: http://assistivetek.blogspot.com/2009/02/webspiration-updated.htmlWebspiration continues to be a work in progress. We are working on many of the other school oriented features you mentioned in your blog post.
Don
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Thanks for the update, Don!
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Hey Don, my friend and colleague David Warlick asks:
“Bummer! In MyWebspiration, hyperlinks do not appear to carry through the the web published version. Anyone know if that can be fixed?”
Thoughts? Just reply here, he’ll see it, and/or I’ll tweet your message.
Thanks, kj
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Alas, Webspiration still lacks many of Inspiration’s advanced features. When you upload your Inspiration 8 files, hyperlinks are not transferred. Webspiration has a much simpler hyperlinking feature that allows hyperlinking via an entire symbol or outline topic. Inspiration has automatic hyperlink recognition and the ability to hyperlink via a piece of text.
Right now, a workaround in Webspiration is to use the Hyperlink button to recreate the links.
Webspiration is an improving web service and we do plan to fill in these features.
Don
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Don, thank you for the information! -kj-
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Hi Kevin,
I have just started using Webspiration and find it great for planning classroom layouts for an action research study I am doing. One problem I am having is printing from the Webspiration window. It wants to print the whole white background which is huge, not just my small document in the middle. I am wasting tons of paper (and trees) trying to get it to work. Any ideas would be welcome. Thanks.
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Hmmm. Will it allow you to export to an image file – which you could then crop? -kj-
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Thanks, I’ll try that.
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No, I can’t export as an image file. I tried downloading as a MS Word document. It came up on the screen in Word, but very blurry, and the graphics were moved around. We don’t have Inspiration in our school. I’ll invite you to collaborate on it, and maybe you’ll have another idea.
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I guess I need your email address to invite you. I tried clicking on your Contact link, but it didn’t give me your address. How can I invite you?
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