Recently concept mapping for me has taken a different turn. After 10+ years as a high school educator, I have begun a new challenge – graduate school. Now rather than using concept maps with my students to help them organize their thinking in active, cooperative ways, I am using this tool to guide my own understanding as a student in the classroom and as a researcher.
MORE >>Even as the oft-accepted notion of multiple-learning styles was called into question by a recent NY Times article ("
Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits" by Benedict Carey, 09/06/2010), teachers infer that different students think differently, based on the questions they ask, how they assemble information, and misconceptions they hold. What's really neat is to see those differences revealed in the layout of their concept maps.
MORE >>I think we have all had those times when you are trying to figure out how to do something, and you’ve spent hours and hours, days and days, and even months on it, but you just feel like you’re going nowhere with it. You just seem to reach a wall where you see many of the pieces you want to fit together, but you can’t seem to make it fit. Then something happens where you “see the light” and you wonder why it took so long. I had one of those “see the light” moments during the third COSEE-OS webinar when I listened and watched Dr. Larry Mayer discuss his carbon cycle concept map.
MORE >>Educator Michele Benoit (Bangor, ME) addresses challenges she experienced getting her students to make connections with science content.
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