Concept Mapping

[Cyndi Danner-Kuhn]

Teachers from the Trenches
What software do you use for Concept Mapping and what benefits do you see. If you don't use one of the Inspiration products, what do you use and why. What are your recommendations and thoughts about Concept Mapping?

TECS 290 Students:
Now that you have explored the Inspiration software and ready what the Teachers form the Trenches have to say, how do you see yourself using Concept Mapping in your classroom someday.

[Catelyn Manly]

I chose Inspiration, and it is amazing. I really love the Thinking Skills. The Opinion Proof Map is organized and detailed. I also like the Question Formation and the Comparison Graph.

In the planning category I like the Goal Planning and Goal Setting, Lesson Plan and Makeup Work

The Substitute Lesson is also pretty handy. This could be helpful if each school and/or school district made this mandatory/uniform to help out the substitues. It would probably help things run smoothly.
The Progress Reports are also nice because they have everything organized, and the teacher can make notes for each student.
I even found a lab report in the Science Section that I could use. The Language Arts tools looked pretty cool, too. Even though I'm going to teach math, I may still need to use those. When I was leaving high school it was a big thing to integrate writing into EVERY subject, so these would be some good resources to have.

[Christy Buck]

These links are really great! I think they will definitly come in handy when i finally get into the classroom. The only problem i foresee with this softaware is the cost, however some schools do not have to worry about money, but what about the schools that do? These links give some really good guidance as to how to organize different ways of thinking. I love all the technology that is out there to be used, I just wish more of it was cost friendly!

[Veronica Deines]

I explored Kidspiration the most because that is most likely what i would be using in my future classroom. I was already somewhat familiar with Inspiration because we use it in high school fairly frequently. I did not realize that concept mapping was a state standard at all grade levels, so I was glad to have the opportunity to explore kidspiration. My favorite thing about Inspiration is how you can jazz up your concept map to make it more visually pleasing. That is a big deal to me because even though it sounds trivial I personally like to look at pretty things, and many students I am sure are the same way. The mapping will be more likely to catch their attention and draw them in, and it is so easy to use!! One of the teachers I interviewed for the assignment during week one is a K teacher and she told me she regularly uses Kidspiration.

I see myself using concept mapping in my classroom very often using kidspiration, or any other program that comes out by the time I'm in the classroom.

[Ryan Meng]

I have never used Inspiration personally or seen it being used but I have heard of it and I believe that is being used in Garden City schools. After exploring the site and messing around a bit, I think this is an exciting resource for students. I think to some extent, it can "trick" students into learning. I could envision myself using it in a Health class for assignments dealing with the various systems of the body and how they work together. As I've stated about many other resources in this class, I believe the possibilities with Inspiration are limited only by the teachers who use them. I can envision the students having a blast constructing concept maps using this software. I bet I'd struggle to keep up with them!

[Bronwyn Smith]

I liked the Inspire Data tutorial for grades 4-12. It offered a great way to display information in different graphs and plots. I think students would really enjoy this program. On one of the extra links to edhelper, I came across "runaway math puzzles." These were like crosswords, but with mathematical equations instead of words. This would be a great activity to give to students who had finished their work early. I have seen a few comments in this discussion about bubbl.us. I will have to try it!

[Nicole Reichert]

Kidspiration seems like a great tool for the classroom. It allows the students to use it as a visual aide. It helps students to categorize and group ideas and to help them comprehend and communicate what they have learned. The awesome thing about the graphic organizer is that it allows multiple learning styles for all the different types of students in the classroom. This is a great program for the classroom and I personally would love to use it in my future classroom. I love using it because it allows the students to be visual learners and to learn each in their own way. The students can get so much out of the graphic organizers since it allows them to improve their literacy skills and to work on organizing their thoughts and building on their comprehension skills. It’s an awesome program and I am glad you introduced it to us so we have an idea of what the program is about.

[Emily Higgins]

I chose to really focus on Kidspiration beacuse I really want to teach K-4. I love it, I have explored Kidspiration in the past and always thought it would be extremely good to use with my students. I like that fact that it allows students to visually categorize and group ideas, express and organize thier thoughts, and comprehend and communicate. It is definetely a really easy way to incorporate visual learning principles into your classroom at a young age. I would like to use Kidspiration for all of the subjects I teach. I think that this program can be used with science, social studies, language arts, math, etc. There is a hugh selection of graphic organizer activities that I can have my students work on. Depending on the grade level the students can build organizers with either, pictures, text, and spoken words to reperesent their thoughts and information they gather from the lesson. I can see Kidspiration being an excellent tool for improving comprehension and literacy skills. I can see no better way for young elementary students to organize their thoughts and ideas for the writing process than utilizing Kidspiration. The tutorial is also very easy to follow and really teaches you a lot! Thanks for reminding me about "Kidspiration", I will add it to my social bookmarking site and use it with my future students.

[Tana]

I was really excited when I got to start exploring Inspiration. I'm a very visual learning and I HAVE to write things down in order to remember them. I'm a concept mapping freak! Thanks for pointing out these great programs. Since I use them so much I know I will use them in my classroom. It's such a great way to get students to organize their thoughts a little bit. However, since this class I've found I have a very deep appreciation for anything free. I've already tagged bubbl.us and started working with it. I'm not big into the flashy so I believe bubbl.us will work great for me and my needs. However, if my district has it I'll obviously use it! Thanks for the suggestion Teachers from the Trenches!

[Sky Davis]

I downloaded the Kidspiration and found the site very user friendly. Concept Mapping is a new term to me, however I think that I have down similar exercises like this when I was in school, however I didn't have the luxury of having a free computer program that would make my presentation or assignment look so nice, or put together. There was one post about the concept mapping breaking down a book, but I imagine there are many possibilities utilizing this concept!

[Lucas Moll]

After checking out all the links in the Inspiration website I am very pleased to see the more advanced tools that this program has to offer. I have used Inspiration to make several concept maps/graphic organizers and was overall very disappointed with the results. With just squares, circles, arrows, and text I thought the concept maps looked visually bland at best. Although I still believe that some work could be done to make the default concept maps more visually enticing, it is nice to see that pictures, videos, and hyperlinks can be easily added to these maps. The simplicity of the program is also a real plus.
I really like the idea of an interactive whiteboard. I will have to look into these whiteboards to see what all they can be used for(other than inspiration) and see how much it might cost to requisition one.
Some of the examples in the curriculum integration section are awesome. It is nice to be able to see actual examples of things I can do in the HS Science classroom. My favorite is the Skeletal System concept map. I have been fighting with ways to be able to put a concept map together with all the material (and memorization) we do in Anatomy and Physiology.
I hope to be able to put this knowledge into practice this coming year. What I would really love to be able to do is to put these maps on my website. Hopefully, kids will want to access this stuff where I can put attach videos and animations to help them study and understand concepts like mitosis, meiosis, osmosis, and etc. Hopefully exporting in HTML format will still allow the full options of this program to be used.
I am personally a big fan of concept mapping as this helps the students(as well as myself) to see relationships and thus group and organize information in their brains.

[Renee Nonamaker]

I chose to explore Kidspiration. I can't believe things like this are out there. Concept mapping seems like a great and idea and yet another amazing resource for the classroom. I feel like it was easy to work with Kidspiration and it was only my first time. Teachers are always needing things that they can use in a hurry and easily and this is great!

[Kara Gerstenkorn]

I love graphic orgainzers. I use them EVERYTIME i write a paper. The best way for me to organize my thoughts is through a graphic organizer. I use everything from the 5WH (who what when where why how) to Venn diagrams (two interlocking circles) to a story map. I have actually made up some graphic organizers that a six grade class I was observing used. It was great. It helped them idenitify the parts of a story and the main ideas useing just one or two words. It really make them think about the topic and the story more in depth.