Concept Mapping: a Powerful Tool for Building Actionable Knowledge

 

According to Marek Dudas, "Concept mapping is a way of representing knowledge or ideas as concepts and relationships between them. A concept in the map is anything we want to talk about, i.e., any real-world object, an abstract term, an event, or even a fact. Concepts are usually represented by text in rectangles and relationships as oriented links between the rectangles, with arrows showing the reading direction. Visually, concept maps look like mind maps".  You can read his article by clicking here.  If you would like some sites that offer mapping click here or here or here.

Mindmapping with Forky

 Do you want to create a mindmap?  If so I have posted about this several times.  Click here and here.     Today I am posting about another site called Forky.  It is free but you have to register.  To see it click here.

Mind Maps

Text2Mindmaps is a long dead website but it has sort of been brought back to life by Tobias Lofgren's blog.  I posted about this site and you might want to look at it to see an example from Algebraic Geometry to see  how the mapping can work out.  To see that post click here. I have also previously posted about other mind mapping sites click here. 


  If you go to Tobias's site you can just type over the left hand side with your own ideas that will be placed in the mind map.  It is a fairly straight forward process.  Type over the example on the left hand side and your sentence appears on the mind map.  If you indent your next sentence your new subtopic will appear in a different rectangle attached by a line to the main topic (first sentence).  If you indent again your next line will show attached to the your subtopic, if you do not indent this sentence will attach back to the main topic.  See my picture below.  To see the website click here

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Spicynodes

According to Common Sense Education, "SpicyNodes is a website that can be used to create mind maps, take notes, write a story, or capture any information that lends itself to a non-linear presentation. You'll begin by adding content into separate nodes using a database-like interface. Content can include plain text, images, video, or audio, which you can upload or snag from the Internet. Things look pretty technical at this point, but you can always click Preview to view how your info will look in the actual nodemap. Once a map has been developed, you can fly around it, zooming in on nodes and exploring info."

This strikes me as a way to present  information, similar to Prezi but different.  As an educational tool, I think Spicynodes would be great to preview a course or review a unit.  See an example by clicking here.  For a tutorial, watch the video below.  To see the website, click here.

Mind Maps with Coggle

Mind Mapping and Concept Mapping is not a new concept but sometimes we forget to use this for our students that are for the most part visual learners.  I posted about a couple sites before for Mind Mapping.  To see that post click here.   Another one is Coggle.  See the video below on how to use this free site.  To see the website click here.

Instagrok - a mind mapping search engine

This is one of my favourite sites this year!  Here is another way for your students to search for information rather than Googling it.  Instagrok puts all the information that it searches on a topic in the form of an interactive  mindmap. This is great for students that have a problem with linear progression.  Instagrok has an algorithm that rejects inappropriate sites and sites with bad language.     Check out the site by clicking here.  Here is an example of what I received from inquiring about Begium and Food.

You can now click on each element of this mindmap and it will further search that subtopic. If you notice the left red arrow in the picture above.  If you move the slider I am pointing to you can change the level of difficulty you want to search.  So if you have a more advanced class, you might want to pull the slider all the way to the right or to the left if you have a more basic class.   The right red arrow points to an information box.  In this box there are a bunch of very short Key Facts with a link to the page source.   You can change from Key Facts to Websites or Videos or Images or Concepts. Below is a video about instagrok.