Embedded Task 5

This is what my mind looks like when I first see an Assessment task! 

I often feel overwhelmed by too many competing ideas, and unable to make sense of the million thoughts rushing through my mind. My normal coping strategy is to write down a plan to help me organise my mind without getting sidetracked by unnecessary details (something I struggle with daily). I have never actually used a mind map or a visual aspect to my planning prior to this and I can't believe what I was missing! 

After a few false starts my assessment plan ended up looking like this

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One of the most appealing aspects of this tool was the ability to visually represent the chaos in my mind and then transform it into order, it was very cathartic. I also like the idea that its never finished you can just keep on refining your ideas as they occur to you. I felt that keeping the original and various versions was very important to help me see how much progress I had made.

Technical Specs:
The free version of Text2mindmap is fairly limited, you can really only customise the space by changing the text and colours and line width. It has a lock/unlock feature as well as an editing or read only version. There is the option to download the map as a PDF or image and you can only create one map at a time without a subscription. No versions seem to have a ability to embed or upload images or links into the map which I think would be an excellent addition. The only knowledge required to use this tool is the ability to use tab correctly so all the subbranches end up where you want them to. Overall it was very user friendly.

Learning outcomes:
The genius of this tool is that it is essentially a visual representation of a thought process and so can be used to teach and illustrate higher thinking processes. It allows you to see where you are getting confused, sidetracked or overwhelmed with too many ideas and then organise them and continue to refine them until you are satisfied as either an individual or as part of a group.  The final result isn't really that important but the process of getting there is. Setting students the task of creating a map on any topic would be an excellent way to get to know the way your students think and maybe enable you to identify their learning style. This could be used in conjunction with any task that required planning or organisation.

S: Divide students into groups and set them a task to brainstorm on a topic using computers and a mindmap. This is no different than getting students to brainstorm using pen and paper while this could be an effective teaching tool for some situations it isn't using ICT to its fullest potential.

A: Students are asked to create a series of successively refined mind maps illustrating their progressing understanding of a topic. This is a good use of visual representations but isn't at the transformative level of digital pedagogy.

M: Students are given a difficult maths problem of a type they have never seen with a worked example. Using a mind map tool and information they can infer from the worked example students are asked to reverse engineer how to solve the problem, they are then requested to come up with a general rule. All mind maps are published on the class website, from these the teacher helps the class to creates a single mind map on how to solve that type of problem. This way the teacher becomes the facilitator and they have taught themselves a concept! The mind map would also be great revision tool, and comparing the different mind maps would illustrate how many different approaches their are in solving a problem and encourage students to think outside the box.

R: Using the scientific method as a scaffold to form the basis of a mind map, students are set the task of creating a mind map to come up with a testable hypothesis on a given topic. The mind maps and hypothesis are uploaded to the internet and members of the public or other schools are encouraged to try the experiment and post the results. After the results are collated a refined hypothesis is formulated using the mind map and the process is repeated as long as results keep coming in. This illustrates beautifully the concept that science has no facts only more refined theories.

Please see above the mind maps I created, or follow this link.