I think that it is great and absolutely beneficial to use visual thinking software in the classroom. It has been proven to be an effective means of helping students understand and recall what they have been taught. It also makes things far more interesting than reading straight from the book or sitting and listening to someone lecture, which will help to keep the student's attention.
I wish that I would have had the chance to use programs like Kidspiration or Inspiration when I was in school. It helps to visually connect ideas and organize information in very easy to use programs. I think that Kidspiration is beneficial because it is very child-friendly and easy to navigate, which will get children in the younger grades comfortable using the computer early on. For students in the older grade levels, Inspiration could be helpful to organize and make sense of very complex ideas and visually see how the concepts are all interconnected or it could be used to organize points to write an essay.
I think that SMART boards are another very helpful educational tool. As a high school art teacher, I really couldn't see a SMART board in my classroom, but for other classes I think that they would be very beneficial. Having a SMART board in the classroom is a good way to present notes to the class. Teachers can include typed text and then later during the presentation write more about a point or have students come up to the board and fill in the answers. It is very interactive for students to be able to come and directly write or draw on the board or move things with their fingers. For teachers it is a way to transfer notes that they had hand-written into a text format and pass out to students. I think that that would help students pay closer attention to the lesson because they would be able to pay more attention to the lesson if they aren't struggling to keep up with writing their own hand-written notes.
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