Tips, Tools and Technology for Educators

Mind maps help students visually represent words and ideas, organize their thoughts, and make plans. They can be used on many levels of Bloom's Taxonomy - to sort, classify, visualize, make connections, organize, generate, create and so much more. For more information, click here.

In the past, my students have drawn mind maps by hand. I noticed that this makes it difficult to edit, save, share, or collaborate in the process. These simple and free virtual tools make all this possible, with no installation required.

www.mapul.com

Create, save, collaborate, and share completely organic looking mind maps online including images, hyperlinks, and more.

Brainstorm online with this simple and free, flash based web application that allows you to create colorful mind maps that you can share with others, save as an image, email, print, or embed in your site.

www.gliffy.com

This online diagram software allows you to easily draw and share all sorts of professional-quality charts, diagrams, technical drawings, floor-plans, and much more.

www.mind42.com

Manage all your ideas alone or in collaboration with others. You can include even wiki articles and easily publish or share your mind maps.

www.mindmeister.com

This is a collaborative mind mapping application with real-time brainstorming that allows you to simultaneously work on maps with friends and colleagues and see changes as they happen.

www.wisemapping.com

Design colorful mind maps that allow you to link documents, share with friends, or embed into your own web page or blog.

Looking for more extensive mind mapping software? Check out this blog post with 30 + mind mapping tools organized by free and paid memberships.

Free Teacher Resources by Learning Today

"If children are turned loose to surf, then Internet in the schools won't be a minor educational improvement, but a major disaster." -David Gelernter

Web-based instructional activities have an enormous potential to enhance and entice learning. Unfortunately integrating the internet into your curriculum in a way that has a positive impact on students' learning is often a difficult process. Below are some questions to ask yourself to help you get started.

5 Questions for Planning Successful Web-Based Activities

1. What is the curriculum related purpose of the activity? The outcome or assessment should be aligned to your lesson objectives and standards.

2. Does the Internet enhance the activity? If the answer is no, find a more appropriate place to integrate the web.

3. How will students use the online resources? Once students locate information, they should be asked to apply, analyze, synthesize, evaluate, or create. The activity should require them to move to higher levels of Bloom's Taxonomy.

4. Do students have necessary information analysis/information synthesis skills or am I including these in instruction? The project should not become simply an exercise in locating information. Students must have the necessary background knowledge and pre-requisite skills to complete higher level tasks or these must be included in instruction prior to the web-based learning activity.

5. Do I have the necessary time and support for the activity? Double your original time estimate and always have access to technical support to resolve problems efficiently.

What are some ways you have found to ensure that your web-based instructional activities have a positive impact on student learning?

Lists are based on those outlined in Integrating Educational Technology into Teaching by M. D. Roblyer.

Here's another poster to help get you thinking about how you can apply Bloom's higher-order thinking skills in your classroom. This poster shows the segments of an orange with each segment relating to a thinking skill and some helpful verbs to serve as prompts.

While there are many more verbs that we could have added, we felt that including just seven in each segment would make them easier to remember (For more information, see Miller's paper "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information."

We thought it would be interesting to depict the verbs in a circular form as opposed to a hierarchical list, given that these skills don't often occur in isolation and are interconnected. We went through several concepts including a wheel, a pie, and an apple, but somehow the orange seemed to work best when we put everything together.

For those of you who prefer it, we've also created a grayscale version of the poster. And if for some reason you're against "oranges" and prefer lists, you can just download the Blooming Verb List. You should be able to glue the template onto a 3" x 5" index card or colored card stock, making it easy to carry around.

Let us know what you think - you know we're always listening! ;-)

Download the pdf's here:

• Blooming Orange - Bloom's Taxonomy Helpful Verbs Poster (Color)
  
• Blooming Orange - Bloom's Taxonomy Helpful Verbs Poster (Grayscale)
• Blooming Verbs List

The Blooming Orange poster by Learning Today is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

[Updated Nov 9, 2009 - Thanks for the feedback everyone! A special thanks to Mr. Portman & Ms. Quirk for their additional comments. Mr. Portman, we're happy that British students can also now enjoy the Blooming Butterfly poster. To our educator friend in Iceland, we are officially releasing the poster under a Creative Commons license today! To read more about the terms, click on the links below the image.]

 
The Blooming Butterfly poster by Learning Today is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

[Updated Nov 6, 2009 - Due to popular demand, we've switched the position of the Blooming Butterfly. The thinking skills now read from left to right!]

For decades, Bloom's Taxonomy has helped teachers plan lessons and design instruction. When Benjamin Bloom and a team of educators first conceived the classification in the late 1940's, they probably never imagined the impact their work would have over 50 years later. While other theories and systems have come and gone, Bloom's taxonomy appears to have become the most commonly used standard in many educational settings. In the 1990's, Lori Anderson and a group of psychologists updated the taxonomy in the hope that it would have more relevance for 21st century students and teachers, transforming the nouns to verbs and making some other seemingly small but significant changes. An interesting account of the history of Bloom's Taxonomy can be found here.

The Blooming Butterfly poster was designed by the Learning Today product development team as a tribute to Bloom and Anderson and to the educators all over the world that continue to implement their vision. We hope that it will serve as a visual reminder for teachers as they continue to guide students to become better thinkers, just as Bloom imagined many years ago!

Download The Blooming Butterfly poster as a pdf.