Map their Minds
First, it was a great week for me to meet with so many of the teachers from the middle and high school planning G21 student projects. More than one of the projects inspired this Friday’s note on mind maps.
According to the netizen’s encyclopedia, a mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. (Wikipedia, 2008)
It also turns out they they make for great advance organizers. Using advance organizers at the start of a lesson has been proven through research to better student success. (Marzano et al., 2001)
The Wikipedia (2008) continues: Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid to study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.
Wow-sounds like a powerful tool you may want to use. Using a Promethean Board, you can design a mind map together with students using Inspiration software. Have students come up, assign images to concepts, re-arrange concepts by grouping or comparisons, and display the mind map through subsequent activities.
Create your own mind map as a scaffold that gets printed and used at students’ desks as they work through problem solving or reading.
Publish Inspiration-created mind maps on your blog as review documents for tests and quizzes.
The bottom line is, mind maps visually represent relationships that may be difficult for students to see using only words and paragraphs. Whether or not you use Inspiration to make you maps is irrelevant: but so many lessons could be improved through the use of webs or diagrams such as a mind map! Creating the maps on a computer has an advantage: it can be used both in the tactile and the digital realm.
For review, reproduce a mind map used at the start of a lesson, and complete the lesson (for closure) by having the students ‘fill in the blanks’ of the map, either by providing missing nodes, or filling in the words already represented by pictures.