Multimedia Mind Mapping

One of my son's favorite organizational activities is mind mapping.  A mind map is a visual organizer that shows ideas, words, concepts, resources and their relationship to a central term, idea, or project.  He loves creating them, and as I stated in an earlier post, created a mind map of his own mind for me as a Mother's Day Present:

There is a new mind mapping tool that is out in beta right now, and it looks really interesting.  Whereas most mind mapping software deals just with text information, the new SpiderScribe program allows you to incorporate other types of data, including pictures, websites, Word documents or other files, a calendar, or even an interactive Google map.  Users can keep their maps private, or choose to share them with a select group who access it via a link you give them, or make it open to anyone on the Internet.  You can also control whether people can just see the mind map or if they can edit it as well.

SpiderScribe has only recently been released, so there may be some glitches and some support issues, and there are additional features that are already being requested.  But as our middle school students are being called upon to create more and more PowerPoints and other multimedia presentations, this may be a powerful way for them to brainstorm, work on group projects, and organized different types of resources on whatever topic they might be working on at the time.

Curriculum Resource: Software to Create Your Own Solar System

As I mentioned in my article about the New Zealand Charity Bundle from CurrClick, we are fortunate enough to live in the same region as Science Jim, who is an exemplary physics teacher.  He took a physics class with him last year that was supplemented with programming the physical phenomenon that was led by Maria of Natural Math.  It was a really good class, and I think my son learned a lot.

He has been really fascinated lately with one of the resources he discovered through taking that class.  He has been using the software, called About My Solar System from the PHet project at the University of Colorado.  The intention of the software is to provide students with the ability to run interactive simulations of physical phenomemon using computer.

In the program my son is using lately, one can choose a planet obiting the sun.  Then you can add a moon, and see what that does to the orbit.  But then you can have another moon show up, or another planet, or even another sun--all of which effect the student's solar system.  It allows the user to adjust all sorts of thing--trajectory, speed, storage weight, etc.--to see what happens in terms of its orbit.  Plus, it keeps the patterns of all the orbits, which after a while ends up look like some cool spirograph art.

It's a good program and we recommend it to all.

Curriculum Resource: Fling the Teacher

One of the fun free educational software programs that you can use to check your students' knowledge on a subject is "Fling the Teacher."  In this software, students get to change the look of the "teacher"--hair and skin color, hair style, mouth/teeth, accessories (glasses and earrings), etc.--stick him in a barrel, and fling him through the air using a trebuchet they construct by answering 15 questions correctly.  It is pretty much just a fact recall quiz, but it is kind of cute and the students enjoy building up their equipment until it is ready to toss the digital professor into the air.

We used this software this week in our 19th Century History Coop to review some of the facts about the Westward Expansion and Industrial Revolution in the US.  The link for this game is: http://www.solpass.org/7ss/Games/WestwardExpansion.html

There is another quiz about this time period as well, which you can see at: http://www.lisd.net/schools/briar/fling/Westward%20Expansion.html

What is nice about these games is that they are quick, so you can complete them in a short enough period of time that the students don't lose interest.  You can do them several times in a role to get enough right answers to complete your trebuchet and fling the teacher; the software scrambles the answers (and sometimes the questions), so the students really learn the questions they answered incorrectly at first on subsequent tries of the problem.  Best of all, the software is open to everyone to create your own quiz using your own questions for whatever subject you are studying.

Here is a website with a list of Fling the Teacher quizzes from American History.

Here is one with questions about World, but mostly European History.

Here is one with other subjects.

And if you want to make your own, here is where you download the software.

Or, even better, get your students to create one to demonstrate how much they have learned!

Educational Resource: NoodleTools Bibliography Software

As our students move into the highly-shareable world of digital information, it is really important to teach them from an early age the ethical practice of identifying the source of text, pictures, or other content they may borrow and incorporate into their own materials.  This includes the more information types of credit statements on websites, blog posts, etc., as well as the traditional modes of including a bibliography of sources used in developing a paper, report, or other writing.

And as long as they are starting to maintain resources from an early age, why not have them present them in one of the major styles they will be required to use by the time they are in college, or even in high school--styles like the MLA, APA, or Chicago/Turabian style?  Fortunately, there is software available that makes it easy for even elementary students to generate bibliographies with the proper formatting to meet these criteria.

There are many bibliography packages out there, many of which are free and/or open source.  However, my favorite one so far is called Noodle Tools.  While the complete package is not free, it is available for a single family use for a very reasonable subscription of $8/year.  I haven't done an exhaustive comparison, but I found Noodle Tools to be the most intuitive and easy-to-use of any of the packages, and it is worth $8 to me for the cleaner, more user-friendly (especially for a child) interface.  Plus, there is a stripped down version that is free, and would probably be acceptable for most middle school and even some high school uses if all you want to do is to create a bibliography.

With Noodle Tools, you start a project, decide which format you want to use for the bibliography, and start inputing data for the requisite fields (author's name, publisher, date of publication, etc.).  That database then formats the information in the proper format for the selected style (MLA, APA, etc.)  However, in the paid version, you can also create note cards attached to that citation, and use those to take notes or even cut and paste text, graphics, photographs, etc. from that source that you want to include in your paper.  You can export that information and/or bibliography either to a Word document or to a Google Doc document.

The website also has resources about citation rules as well as the ethical use of outside sources.  It was developed as a teaching tool, and I think it is a great support to help our children learn the proper way of keeping track of and giving credit to the material they draw on from others when they are creating their own works.