Week Four: Mind Maps

I just finished reading the article “Mapping Student Minds” by Ariel Owen. I was impressed with this educator’s use of technology in her class. I had never really considered mind maps or brainstorms as anything more than annoying clutter until I read how she incorporated them into her science class. She was able to use the mind maps as a way for students to track relationships between water quality and the factors that affected it. I can see how this would be a good visual representation of these relationships. It should clarify complex relationships by making them more straightforward and would definitely make the lesson more tangible to visual learners.
One really good suggestion was to start the lesson very simply. Owen introduced the concept of mind mapping on her whiteboard and chose a simple topic “getting good grades” to demonstrate how a mind map worked. Once students were familiar with the concept, they could be introduced to the technology to mind map on a computer using Casual Mapper. I also liked the suggestion to help students trim unnecessary words by asking them to remove at least two repetitive words or concepts from the map. A mind map really isn’t an effective tool if it’s too cluttered to make sense of it!
I think I could apply mind mapping in an English course to explain character relationships and plot devices. I can see how this would be a good tool for students, especially when learning Shakespeare. It would be a neat representation of how everyone in the play was related to one another.