Concept mapping is a beneficial activity for helping students visualize how topics relate to each other. Eventually, having this ability to visualize topics and subpoints will lead to outlining papers (for older grades). I know for myself that I was never very good at visually creating an outline before diving into papers, but I think that it's a vital practice for creating papers that tie together effectively.
Concept mapping can engage students, especially visual students, by teaching them how to organize. I think students who can concept map will have an easier time drafting stories, writing research papers, or writing argumentations. Digital concept mapping, with programs like Inspiration, takes away the frustration of messy eraser marks and lack of room, which can encouage kids to have fun while organizing and conceptually creating a hierarchy of keypoints. For younger kids, concept mapping with pictures can be extremely valuable for students who can't necessarily read yet, but can understand concepts through pictures.
By having students use concept mapping, it gives me, as a teacher, a great tool for determining whether or not they have understanding the concepts I've been teaching. For example, if I have taught a music class the difference between the four instrument families in a Symphony Orchestra, I would have my students make a concept map with these instruments categorized correctly. I think kids would have a fun time organizing concept with this digital media, as well as showing me that they know the information. Concept mapping doesn't even have to be digital! I could have flashcards with instrument names, and they would have to categorize them into groups, which is a form of concept mapping.
Some ideas I have for students using Inspiration or Kidspiration media:
1) Family tree -- help younger students understand the branching of families.
2) Symphony Orchestra Instrument Families -- Classification of types of instruments.
3) Mammals, Amphibians, Aquatic, and birds -- Classification of these types of animals.
4) WWII Events -- Cause and effect points.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Monday, October 8, 2007
Teacher Web Evaluation
1) Grading the teacher webs was a bit challenging just because everybody has such diverse creativity that sometimes the pages weren’t very enticing to me, but it still followed the required criteria. I will also say that it was very difficult to peer review the teacher webs of the people at my table because those people are my friends, so they know that it was me who gave them the score I did. It would have been better to have assigned us random teacher webs (maybe by passing out papers with two teacher websites on them).
2) There were a lot of interesting aspects to reviewing other teacher webs. As I said before, everyone has different creative “geniuses,” and it was great to see some other ideas that I hadn’t thought of before (like some of the announcements people came up with and the pages they chose to use in addition). Both teacher webs that I perused were very thoughtful; the assignments and quizzes made sense for a particular grade level.
3) I’m not sure exactly what I would do differently, knowing what I know now. I think I might have chosen some different pictures for my about me; ones that flowed a little more. Don’t get me wrong, I think they gave a well-rounded image of me, but I might have written my captions to be aimed towards the younger students.
As for what could be different in TeacherWeb? I can think of a lot of things that can be different! TeacherWeb is very basic and certainly pretty user-friendly. However, when it comes to editing pictures, I found the site to be ridiculous! They need some kind of preview feature so that you aren’t sitting there making guesses about how to resize the picture, or what size border you should use. I found that to be completely irritating. A “before” and “after” view would have made that portion of TeacherWeb so much more sophisticated.
Another problem I have with TeacherWeb (which is completely my own preference) is that it is very cut-and-paste. There’s not a whole lot of room to play around with layout. The site is fantastic for teachers with little time and little technological background, but for me, I’d much prefer to create my own page from scratch. Even the Wiki gave me a bit more layout ability (though it was a bit frustrating as well). I’m not sure that I would use a TeacherWeb just because I was so frustrated with the strict format, but that’s nothing against TeacherWeb itself.
2) There were a lot of interesting aspects to reviewing other teacher webs. As I said before, everyone has different creative “geniuses,” and it was great to see some other ideas that I hadn’t thought of before (like some of the announcements people came up with and the pages they chose to use in addition). Both teacher webs that I perused were very thoughtful; the assignments and quizzes made sense for a particular grade level.
3) I’m not sure exactly what I would do differently, knowing what I know now. I think I might have chosen some different pictures for my about me; ones that flowed a little more. Don’t get me wrong, I think they gave a well-rounded image of me, but I might have written my captions to be aimed towards the younger students.
As for what could be different in TeacherWeb? I can think of a lot of things that can be different! TeacherWeb is very basic and certainly pretty user-friendly. However, when it comes to editing pictures, I found the site to be ridiculous! They need some kind of preview feature so that you aren’t sitting there making guesses about how to resize the picture, or what size border you should use. I found that to be completely irritating. A “before” and “after” view would have made that portion of TeacherWeb so much more sophisticated.
Another problem I have with TeacherWeb (which is completely my own preference) is that it is very cut-and-paste. There’s not a whole lot of room to play around with layout. The site is fantastic for teachers with little time and little technological background, but for me, I’d much prefer to create my own page from scratch. Even the Wiki gave me a bit more layout ability (though it was a bit frustrating as well). I’m not sure that I would use a TeacherWeb just because I was so frustrated with the strict format, but that’s nothing against TeacherWeb itself.
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