Strategies – Chapters 4 through 6: I have found using multimedia for graphic organizers and nonlinguistic representations to be very successful in the classroom. I tried it this year when introducing an epals unit on New Zealand to my 5th grade students. Students would be corresponding with students in New Zealand and learning their culture, environment, etc. As we progressed through the details of the project, I showed them videos and other interactive websites portraying the history and culture of New Zealand. When students began corresponding, they had a mental picture of what their new friends talking about when describing where and how they lived. The strategy provided my students with a good knowledge base of the project and having that introductory knowledge led them to inquire deeper details from their epals. I just recently used the summarizing strategy with my 9th grade students. Biology students are required to research short articles based on current events in science and then summarize the article into a short paragraph. I created a model that included a copy of an article where I had highlighted the important points and also the summary paragraph that I produced from the article. This assignment is always given at the beginning of the school year and this is the 3rd year I have used the summary model. I’m amazed at how many past students still refer back to the model in assisting them with other assignments. It’s nice to see that they retained this summarizing strategy.
Compare/Contrast online graphic organizers: Bubble.Us is a free website. It has all the usual organizer features and can be shared with other people. One feature that separates this website from the others that I reviewed is that is it multilingual in some languages. I believe Webspiration is much better than Bubble.Us for many reasons. First, I like how it is categorized into professional, college, and educator levels. It provides many sample maps in these categories as well as tips, trick and FAQ’s are categorized into the three levels as well. It is a well designed website, easy to use, and is also free. One sample map that I will be researching further is the “virtual book club”. Mindmeister is the Cadillac of online organizers. It has many more features than Bubble.Us and Webspiration, however, the basic version is free. The premium versions that contain several more features have an annual fee. There are thousands of sample maps to use of get an idea on where to start your own map. The icon user interface is very easy to use and the website has a great online tutorial. Webspiration is my favorite online organizer, but Mindmeister takes first place overall.
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