Thing #20 Visual Learning/Graphic Organizers

The first portion of the assignment was to make a mind map using bubbl.us or gliffy.  I chose to make a mind map about elephants.  I used the concepts I require my 3rd grade students to use in their animal research reports:  appearance/adaptations, habitat, and endangered status.  Within those concepts, certain areas must be addressed.  The use of this mind map would be a great tool for my third graders to use to help them outline what they need to include in their reports.  I like the idea of the parent bubbles and the children bubbles--when getting down to the actual paragraph language, the parent can be the topic or 1st power sentence, and the children can be the detail 2nd power sentences and their children bubbles can be the 3rd or 4th power sentences.  I can see this tool greatly helping them to focus.  I liked this tool a lot, it's user friendly and will be easily understood by those students who normally struggle with organizational thinking. Here is the screenshot of my mind map:

The second part of the assignment was to make a word cloud from my reflection and to post a screenshot of it.  I chose to use Wordle because it was easier to use and I thought that would be an important consideration for when I attempt to have my students use it.  Easy is good!  Ok, so here's my cloud:

What a fun thing!  What a delicious way to play with vocabulary and organize your thoughts in a fun and creative way.  I can see making a fun class book about a new word cloud from each unit of study in social studies, or the vocabulary for the chapter in math we're using, or the attributes of a character in a book we're reading.  I can see doing word clouds for individual students--assign each child a different student, have them write a paragraph describing them and everything they know about him/her, then making a word cloud out of each student's paragraph and posting them around the room--making a game out of reading the words and trying to figure out whose cloud it is.  I think this is a cool tool that makes something that might very well be tedious and unmotivational into something exciting and graphically creative.  The ability to make them, in itself,  is highly motivational, and since the words are sized by importance (decided upon by frequency of use within the writing used), I can see from a glance the most important concepts in the mind of the writer--this gives me a quick gauge to see if the students understand the concept by the words they choose and their importance in the cloud.  Brilliant use of technology here.  Something that seems so simple, yet is quite powerful in and of itself.  You can, of course use it for the purpose for which it was intended as well--brainstorming.  But no matter how you choose to use it, it's great!  This has been one of my favorites!