The minute I saw the mind maps that bubbl.us offers it's visual appearance immediately reminded me of something I use to explore at the university. It is called Transformational Grammar and it deals with the rules our brains apply when processing language. One of the focuses of TG is a tree-like representation of sentence's structure just like the one I posted here. Now maybe this is not a mind map in the same sense we discussed in this module but then again maybe it is even more of a mind map then that:)
Mind maps could be used to help students enhance their organizational skills but I feel that with Lower School students this can only be done with a lot of help from the teacher. For example when we are having group discussions about various topics students can at the same time use mind maps to graphically represent our train of thoughts. This will help them get a more clear picture of the beauty of brainstorming and help them start to use this sort of tools in their future learning. However, I think that at young age this maybe a bit too advance for them and that's why at this period we should (as with bunch of other things) model this approach for them. One great way bubbl.us can be used however is story maps. Each time I want to use story maps in class I end up googeling through millions of versions until I find the one that most suite the story in question. With this web site in mind students can now make their own story maps adding the branches as they see fit. This will definitely make them more engaged in the activity then when they are simply presented with a printed copy of a map.
Mind maps could be used to help students enhance their organizational skills but I feel that with Lower School students this can only be done with a lot of help from the teacher. For example when we are having group discussions about various topics students can at the same time use mind maps to graphically represent our train of thoughts. This will help them get a more clear picture of the beauty of brainstorming and help them start to use this sort of tools in their future learning. However, I think that at young age this maybe a bit too advance for them and that's why at this period we should (as with bunch of other things) model this approach for them. One great way bubbl.us can be used however is story maps. Each time I want to use story maps in class I end up googeling through millions of versions until I find the one that most suite the story in question. With this web site in mind students can now make their own story maps adding the branches as they see fit. This will definitely make them more engaged in the activity then when they are simply presented with a printed copy of a map.
Well here's another use I'd never considered. There must be hundreds of uses for Bubblus that the creators never thought of. I have used it for brainstorming, workflows, process diagramming, task delegation, compare and contrast graphics, storyboarding, and collaborative story writing.... I wish it were around when I was teaching math.
ReplyDeleteThe beauty of all the free tools available online is that we and our students can get quite inventive with them. When you put two or more applications together, this is called a mashup. An example of this could be embedding a Glogster page into a wiki to add a little more spice. Any embedding for that matter is technically a mashup.
Back to concept mapping, yes, it is very important to model how and when to use these tools - not just in LS either. Another asset to using them in project-based learning groups is that they are very useful at getting students to listen to each other and see issues from different perspectives.