For over 20 years, eighth grade students from White Brooke Middle School have been taking a trip to Washington, D.C. Last spring, four busloads of students and parents hit the road, following the plan they'd made with Inspiration.

At the beginning of the year, the Easthampton, Massachusetts, students use Inspiration to plan their three days in Washington. They create a web with "Washington, D.C. Trip" as the main idea and "Wednesday Night," "Thursday," and "Friday" as subtopics of the main idea. Then, from each subtopic, they RapidFire^TM a list of the sites they'll see on that day.

With a little organization, the students can now see what they will be doing and where they will be going on each day. Using the new symbol libraries in Inspiration 6, the students have more options for the graphics they will use. In the Government Library they will find high-quality and photographic-quality images to illustrate their ideas.

Photographic images of the Supreme Court Building and Capitol Building show the students exactly what they will see.

Inspiration 6 has also made it easier for students to find new symbols to illustrate their ideas. After searching for the Smithsonian Institute on the Internet, the students drag and drop the Smithsonian's logo into their diagram to illustrate their trip to the museum. If they plan to use the symbol regularly, Inspiration 6 makes it easy to save it in their own personal library.

Now that they're using Inspiration 6, the students can also create hyperlinks on their diagram. They found the Smithsonian Institute's home page when they were looking for the graphic. Why not create a link to it from the Smithsonian Institute symbol? Simply highlight "Smithsonian" go to Internet on the Utility menu, and select URL Hyperlink. Inspiration gives them a place to type in the URL for the Smithsonian Institute and shows us there is a hyperlink from the Smithsonian symbol.

Students can also simply type the URL itself into a symbol and Inspiration will automatically recognize the hyperlink.

Mrs. Stewart posts the completed diagram on the school's website: "We make the Inspiration diagram as a visual way to show both students and parents what we will see on the trip," she said. "I then put it on the website so students and parents can see where we went."

After they return from Washington, students can look back to their diagram to reminisce or to show family members what they saw and learned. They can also use the diagram or outline as a pre-writing tool as they write a report about their trip.

Every year, Inspiration helps them plan where they are going and provides a visual reminder of what they saw. With the new symbol libraries and Internet features in Inspiration 6, White Brooke Middle School students have even more tools for writing about and sharing what they learned on their trip.