Engaging Students with Concept Mapping Activities

Concept mapping online is an innovative way to help students visually connect new learning with their prior knowledge, which will increase positive impact on student learning. I plan on using this convenient and effective tool in my own future classroom. The three innovative ways that I see myself using concept mapping in my classroom are as follows:

• Reading- Graphic organizers
• Math- color tiles and fact families to assist kinesthetic learners
• Science- animal classification and food chains

These three innovative ideas will be integrated into my teaching to increase positive impact on student learning as follows:

While reading a novel, I like to have the students organize the characters, plot, and other important features/characteristics using a graphic organizer. Having the availability to do this online will be much more intrinsically motivating for my 4th graders. My class thrives while performing any activity or task on the computer; therefore, the result is more effort put into a quality product and more learning taking plus.

For math, my students would learn best using concept mapping to perform operations and algorithms themselves, versus watching me do it on the overhead. If students had access to online manipulatives such as color tiles to have problems modeled, and then try to do them themselves, learning again would improve. As stated above, anything on the computer is a special treat to my class and the intrinsic motivation that develops as a result, has a very positive impact on my students' learning.

Using a concept map for science will also have a positive impact on student learning. For example, my students can easily use a concept map for animal classification or food web charts. Bringing fun and imaginative activities into learning science automatically leads to greater student involvement and attention, and eventually learning.

I feel that learning more about this type of concept mapping software to be able to put it to future use in my classroom would be well worth my time. My number one goal as an educator is to have a positive impact on my students and their learning, and I feel that by using concept mapping I can reach my goal in a fun and effective way.