Group items tagged

Cacoo is a concept mapping/mind mapping/brainstorming site. It is free and allows for many methods of concept mapping. Great site to use with your classes and students.

This is one of the easier and more versatile concept mapping software online.

Create awesome animated maps. Have your students create a roadmap of places they have been. Have students add video and pictures of those places and create a timeline on how long it took for the trip.

Mind Map for different purposes across the curriculum

There are some amazing tools listed on these sites, including a Mind42 map of Web 2.0 Tools. I can see that my map is quite lacking compared to these. But, now I have an idea as to what to aim for. It would be great to set my students loose of some of these tools. "If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow." (John Dewey). This has been one of my favourite quotes along with "We need to prepare our students/children for jobs that have not been created yet" (Unknown). For me, they sum up what we as teachers need to strive for and that we need to keep on trying to stretch ourselves and our students...after all, we are 13% of the way through the 21st Century. It's exciting.

A great resource site full of rubrics to evaluate web 2.0 tools including cooperative learning ,mind maps, online discussion boards, multimedia presentations etc.

Super easy way to publish and share content. It differs from blogs because it produces single pages not linked to each other. It is not a series of posts. Think of it as a single piece of paper that can include multimedia. Once out of beta, no accounts will be needed which will be great for the educational setting. Students can create projects with text, multimedia and widgets such as Google maps. Pages are then published and a URL is generated for the page which can be shared.

Mindmeister kicks Mind42's butt! A free account entitles you to three beautiful mind maps, complete with text, links, icons and images (Googled from the web).

Web 2.0: Collaborative Instruction Concept map for Critical Thinking

Simplicity and Organized--important in blogs and concept maps. Great way to spark and then keep interest.

Assess student learning at a glance via a honeycomb-style, color-coded display featuring overall student understanding from the individual to district level. I found this very interesting not only due to the ease of use, but also the ease of which you can fluidly bounce between multiple different problem areas quickly and efficiently.

This article points out the significance and the approach to the digital writing in a dialogue style with Troy Hicks, an associate professor of English at Central Michigan University. He uses 'MAPS' heuristic -- mode (genre), media, audience, purpose, situation -- to help writers "intentionally" and "deliberately" think through composing digital texts. He also suggests teachers give themselves and students the opportunities and permission to play (and possibly fail) with the tools, as this can serve as a model of overcoming learning curves and digital writing process. This reminds me of the idea, 'dabble' with the tools, brought up by Jeff Utecht(2013).

This article gives a great example of how a librarian created a lesson that uses many web 2.0 tools while students demonstrated their media literacy skills.

By using libguide a Boston Librarian was able to create a lesson for students to learn about an oil spill off the coast of Louisiana. Using libguide allowed her to combine news links, a Delicious linkroll, an RSS feed, and a Google Map that compares the relative size of the spill to Manhattan, Paris, and other global cities.

I created a Mind42 map to show how Web 2.0 tools can support communications skills, and types of lessons where our curriculum can use these tools and skills. From a Career and Technical School, I focused on the Web 2.0 tools that the articles mentioned that focuses on communications such as videos, podcasts, interactive posters, voice thread, mixbooks, podcast and glogsters. I didn't add them all but just provided examples. These tools can all in some way or another be used to enhance basic work skills of reading, writing, listening and communications. For each skill, I identified type of activities and projects that can be created using these tools. For example writing can be enhanced by having students write procedures, memos or reports.

This article highlights schools that are integrating gps technology into the classrooms and the linking this to students being connected to the real world along with building critical thinking skills. Joseph Kerski, the curriculum manager in Redlands California, is quoted as saying "From bus routing to airplane navigation to geocaching for recreational purposes, it's one of those technologies that's all around us now" . He goes on to say, "And it's not just the tool. It's about students' using those higher-order thinking skills and thinking critically about their world". An earth science teacher , Jim Kuhl, explains how he pairs up reading and interpreting topographic maps with geocaching. GPS can cost as little as $75 per unit and most data phones have a gps embedded. Example provided was Monroe BOCES Stream Team Project where 10 schools are collecting gps and gis data about the quality of streams feeding Lake Ontario.

A librarian uses web 2.0 tools such as RSS and bookmarking to incorporate a real world event into the curriculum to enhance information literacy.

Use Web 2.0 tools to take the students from the classroom into the real world.