In this video, we'll be building some visual maps together that quickly demonstrate what a powerful tool inspiration can be. Inspiration allows you to think and learn visually, which is an effective way of getting information in and out of your brain. And unlike other mind mapping software, the simplicity and intuitiveness of inspiration allows users to focus on the creative and knowledge capturing processes, rather than having to focus on remembering how to do things. By creating organised visual representations of ideas and concepts, we can display large amounts of information in ways that are easy to understand and digest, and help to reveal relationships and patterns. It really is the all in one workspace for thinking and writing. So let's open up inspiration, and we'll begin with the diagram view. And we'll start with something really basic to warm up with. Making the perfect cup of tea. And at this initial stage, we're really just gathering information without any concern for whether it's right or wrong or relevant. For this, I'm going to use Inspiration's rapid fire tool. I'm going to switch it on up here along the top toolbar. And because I don't know yet how these ideas will link together, I'm going to choose without links. So let's get some ideas out. Tea bag. Milk. Okay. So I think that's enough to be going on with for now. RapidFire is brilliant for getting lots of ideas down quickly. It allows me to simply type an idea and hit enter, type another idea and hit enter as you could see. So if you make any spelling mistakes, you can fix them later too, and I'll show you how. So down here, can see I've made a mistake because it's underlined red. Let's go up to the word guide at the top here, and it will give us ideas of of options that we could use. That's obviously the one we want. It will also give us an explanation of the word, and it will also give us synonyms. So let's hit replace. Same with tea bag. Now we've got enough ideas to work with. We can begin to organize them. So let's first identify things that look like they might belong in the same category and then group them together. So we've got kettle, we've got teaspoon, and we've got mug. We'll put those over there. Then we've got milk and boiling water, tea bag, and sugar. And down here, we'll put stir and brew. So these are these items here look like they would sit under equipment. These here look like they would sit under ingredients, and these two can fall under method. So inspiration is great because it's so easy and natural to move things around and change thing change the order on the screen. So now we've got things grouped together. The next process is to add some sub subtopics to our main topic. So now we're making decisions on how to label the groups, and this will forge the direction and shape of our diagram. So let's now link them all together, and we'll do that using the link tool in the top toolbar. So let's link to equipment, and we'll link from there to kettle, to teaspoon, to mug, and then we'll link all the ingredients. The best thing to do now would be to add some color to further establish these different areas. And with one click of a button down here under themes on the bottom toolbar, you can add instant color coding. So there's a bunch of combinations already preset in here, as you can see, and you can create your own, but I'm gonna use this one. This one's my favorite. One click, instant color coding. Color coding is great for recognizing and highlighting patterns, improved memory retention, and increased efficiency. So now let's add some symbols from the symbols library. So let's look for a kettle. Now all you do here is you simply drag and drop the symbol onto the original symbol like this. And let's also go for milk. Some images aren't actually in the symbol library but you can take images that you found online and save them into your own custom symbol library. Here. So as you can see, I did this earlier. So again, we'll drag and drop that onto the map. Okay. So now if you want to expand on one of your ideas, you can add a note. So in here, we're adding a note up here along the top toolbar, and there you see it pops up. Let's pop a note in there, and let's use the new bullet points because we want to show that these are two separate stages. So you have bullet points or you have numbered list. We can also insert a graphic here. Right click, insert graphic, and you can pull anything across that is on here. So let's add that graphic. Okay. Let's close that down for now. That stays here. So you can also add hyperlinks to any file saved on your computer, such as a PDF, and we can also use the hyperlink option to link to a web page. So let's add a web address in this field here. Let's go up to the top, hyperlink. So obviously, if we're making the perfect cup of tea, it stands to reason that we might want to find the perfect biscuit for dunking. And that's immediately hyperlinked and will take us to, the correct page, the correct web page that we're looking for, which is revealing the best biscuits for dunking. We can also add citations to refer our research back to by using the citation tool along the top bar. So let's find that here. And let's just, for the sake of putting something in here, put in Jamie Oliver's how to make the perfect cup of tea so that I can show you how you pop a citation in there. And here's that citation here for when you need to refer to it. So inspiration is brilliant for organizing your research. You can use it to create a real learning hub with access to all of your digital resources. And at any point, I can jump to the integrated outline view, which displays all my information in a linear format. Here. So here you can see we can also resize that image in there because it's massive. Here you can see, the hierarchy of my ideas along with that note that I added and the image that we inserted. And I can continue adding ideas and notes here if I want, and you'll see when I then jump back to the diagram view that they will have carried back over. So let's have a go at adding, something else in here. Let's add a topic and say, China, in terms of the mug China or glass, for example. And let's add a subtopic under that saying your choice. So you'll see when we go back to the diagram view now, that's come over here too. Okay. Now we really I want to really quickly show you just how to arrange this and make it neatest because it's it's already taken shape, but it's in a kind of messy look for now. So let's go to the arrange tool here, and we'll keep it as a tree. Hit okay, and you can see it's all organized and neat now. So now we're armed with some of the basics. We can look at how we might tackle an essay question. But first, I'll come out of this diagram and show you one one of my colleagues made so that I can show you around our new equation editor. So I've opened a map that my colleague has created, and it's also to do with Albert Einstein's key theories. So we'll go into the note that she's already created. And you can see in here there's a very famous equation put down. This isn't easy to do without our equation editor, so I'm gonna show you how this works. So up here along the top toolbar, we have our new symbol. Click that. If you then type in the LaTeX equation, type that in here, you'll see it automatically and instantly comes up with the actual formula in the other side. We can copy that. And then inside the note, we can paste it in as as my colleague already did. We can also paste that in as a separate symbol. So if we wanted to pop it here, we can do that. So that's how the equation editor works. So let's go back now now that we're armed with some of the basics and look at how we might tackle an essay question. So we'll use Einstein's key theories here. And remember, this map was created in the same way as we created the cup of tea map. Getting all those initial ideas down quickly, grouping the ideas together, adding subtopics, linking ideas, adding notes, arranging it and bringing it to life, bringing it to life with color and images. So let's have a look and see how this is going to turning turn into being the body of your essay. Let's remove that because I'm sure it's not needed there anymore. So if we go into the outline view up here on the top again, you can see we have lots and lots of linear arranged information. So let's have a look at transferring this into Microsoft Word, and you'll see how it then looks like an actual essay. So up here on the top toolbar, we select transfer. As you can see, you have options about what you want to bring through. You can choose to include the diagram at the top there or not. You can transfer the outline with topics or hidden subtopics, notes or hidden notes. So let's just include the diagram, click Okay and have it all come through as it is. So now you can see here what a really good first draft we have that we can tidy up and develop.