Get Your "Inspiration" Online

Many educators are familiar with the power of Inspiration as a tool for brainstorming, visualizing, and organizing ideas.  However, fewer people know that the folks at Inspiration have been at work bringing those same capabilities to the web.  Mywebspiration.com is an online service which allows users to create Inspiration webs and outlines directly within their web browser and save the files online.


This means that users are no longer restricted to using Inspiration in any one location.  They can create webs at home, then continue working on the same webs at school or anywhere else where Internet access is available.  There is no software to install, and the process of getting started is relatively painless:

1. Go to mywebspiration.com.
2. Create an account on the site.
3. Once you have created your account and logged in, just click on the "Launch Webspiration" button in the upper, right-hand corner of the screen.
4. Beyond that, the process will be easy for anyone who is familiar with Inspiration, since the online interface is virtually identical to the stand-alone version.

All the features that users are familiar with in the stand-alone version are included here, including templates and the ability to export outlines to MS Word.  Webs and outlines can also be saved locally as Inspiration files, allowing the user to continue working on them within the stand-alone product, although this is probably unnecessary; for web-based graphical software, mywebspiration is remarkably nimble and responsive, given a high-speed Internet connection.

In addition, the online version allows collaboration with others who have Webspiration accounts and tracks the changes made by each contributor.  And, unlike the stand-alone, it also has the ability to export outlines directly to Google Docs.

There is one word of warning, though.  Mywebspiration.com is a beta (read "test") site.  This means that at some time in the future, when the developers are content that they have a solid product, the site will go commercial, and users will have to pay a subscription fee for the service.  Right now, though, the developers have given no time line for when this might happen, so I would recommend making use of a good thing while it lasts.