I love mindmaps (concept maps), not only for my own use in preparing presentations or mapping out a problem in a PBL unit, but I love having students create their own, either as a before, during, or after learning activity. What I love the most about mindmaps for student use is that, to me, they are one of the best formative assessments to use in order to see what students really understand and exactly how they are understanding it. You can see beyond content acquired and peer right into what connections students are making between concepts, as well as seeing how their brains are working to organize information--a key skill that many students lack and isn't explicitly taught to most students. In other words, it helps students get beyond "I have to know this" and gets them to "I can think about this."
And the only way students can get better at organizing and thinking about concepts is to organize information and think about concepts, which, in my classroom, means making at least one concept map per unit, with students mindmapping different ways or with a different focus in mind each time.
Here are some ways I use mindmaps with my students:
- When first learning to use mindmaps, I create one myself, but leave the connectors (lines between bubbles) blank. Students then have to come up with their own labels for connectors to determine the relationship between the words. This is to emphasize that mindmaps are about connections and relationships, not about listing definitions to words (a hard habit for my students to break).
- When students first create one, I have them first do some "pre-thinking" about words that I give them to use. They have to do a modified List/Group/Label strategy first, where students put the words on index cards first, write out their meanings in their own words, and then group words that belong together by putting their index cards into piles. Students then label the reason why they grouped them together (which become categories in their mindmaps). From here, students then have the outline for their mindmap, which they then create.
- After studying a set of objectives (I can statements in our lingo), I will ask students to create their own map, thinking of all necessary words and phrases needed first--without me listing out the words this time-- and then creating their map.
- After reading the objectives (I can statements)--which we teachers spend a lot of time developing, structuring, and putting in an order that we think will make sense to students--students design a map that shows the overall organization for that set of objectives. For example, I had students do this to our cell organelle objectives, because I wanted to see if they could pull out the categories in which to put each organelle (many students simply ignored the categories, which are in big, bold print and underlined, and just hooked organelles off a central bubble in their map, which tells me they are still focused on the words, not the concepts). This map serves as the "learning framework" for the rest of the objective, to which they will add information, analogies, and connections to answer the essential question.
- These are also great for test review, and I have also assigned them as end-of-semester final exam projects.
I also give them a lot of choices as to what they can use to make their mindmaps. In my 1:1 classroom, they have a lot of Web 2.0 tools they can use to make their mindmaps. My students can usually use any tool they'd like for mindmapping, but some of their favorites are Popplet, bubbl.us, Creately, Mindomo (very powerful, but the free version only lets you have 3 maps), and Wisemapping (a lot like Mindomo, but you can have unlimited maps in the free version).
A word of caution, however--just like any awesome strategy, mindmaps can be misused in the classroom. The worst way I have seen them used is by transforming them into worksheets rather than learning activities. This is where the teacher makes one, and leaves some bubbles and connectors blank for students to fill in. While this might be a good way to start introducing students to concept maps, if this is the only way you use them, students will never learn to make connections on their own--they will eventually view it as yet another worksheet to fill out, to find the answers you want them to get, imposing your understanding of the connections on them rather than the students creating their own understandings, relationships, and meanings. In my crazy view of education, my main goal is to produce thinkers and reasoners and not memorizing robots, and we can't do that if we continually set up activities where we've done all the thinking for them.
Also, mindmaps shouldn't be used for students just to list all of the disconnected facts they have memorized about objectives. Let's take the cell organelle example I mentioned earlier. If I had instead told students to put "Organelles" in the center and then copy the individual I can statements as connectors from that center bubble, all students would have done is list paragraphs of copied information about each I can statement in one large bubble, with very little connection-making happening. How do I know this? Because I've seen it happen when students do this to take the "easy" way out of a mindmapping assignment. This is why I have a "only 1-2 words per box, only 1-2 word per connector" rule at all times, so students can break down concepts and make as many connections as possible--not copy as much information as possible into one bubble.
One other consideration while looking at student mindmaps is giving students effective feedback. Mindmaps work just like any other assignment--students need feedback to help them improve. I often do not score mindmaps my students make, but I do give them copious amounts of feedback so they can learn how to make connections properly. I will note if any connections are overtly wrong, but, to me, mindmaps as a whole don't really have a "right" or a "wrong" (another reason I don't like the worksheet approach mentioned earlier)--only valid/nonvalid lines of thinking and logic. Also, I don't want to focus on right or wrong answers, because students too often think that school is about getting things right when school is/should be about thinking and learning how to learn.
For more information about mindmapping/concept mapping, you can check out the resources below:
Best Tools and Practices for MindMapping (has many resources)
Mindmapping Resources
11 Free Mind Mapping Applications & Web Services
Many examples of mindmaps