2016 has been an eventful year for Ideaphora, with the launch (out of beta) of our online concept mapping environment for individuals and for classrooms as well as additional investment from our partner, BrainPOP®. Now, Ideaphora is being honored for distinction among its edtech peers.
As we noted in a previous blog post, an engaging, distraction-free digital learning environment is critical to student comprehension and academic performance. To that end, Ideaphora has added new enhancements to its online concept mapping platform to offer even greater convenience and time-savings, and further minimize disruptions to students’ thinking and learning while they interact with digital content.
Due to their cost-effectiveness and convenience, digital texts are becoming as popular inside classrooms as they are outside school walls. Students will increasingly encounter digital text in their academic, personal and professional lives, so it's imperative they learn how to read proficiently in both print and digital formats.
A growing body of research indicates students read differently online than they do in print. Students tend to consume ebooks and other digital materials, such as online articles and videos, passively, skimming the material rather than deeply engaging with it. Studies have shown students' comprehension suffers when reading online. Research by the Schugars, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, and others, as detailed by Education Week, indicate that the same attributes of ebooks that increase students' motivation to read also create distractions for students, affecting the way they read.
The Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Project Zero defines Visible Thinking as “a flexible and systematic research-based conceptual framework, which aims to integrate the development of students' thinking with content learning across subject matters.” The Project has distilled this framework into several thinking routines that are simple protocols for exploring ideas and make students thinking visible. Teachers are encouraged to integrate these routines into daily classroom life and use them with their students to extend and deepen their thinking. These easy-to-learn mini-strategies are focused on four "thinking ideals" – understanding, truth, fairness, and creativity.
With our new Classroom edition, it’s easy for educators to get started and use concept mapping in a digital learning environment with their students. Ideaphora Classroom provides all the features of the platform for individual users plus administrative tools for teachers: Google Classroom and Edmodo integration, class roster and workflow management, safety/privacy controls, and settings for content access and other preferences.
This week students at every level from kindergarten to college have returned to school. But, hitting the proverbial books may no longer hold true as teachers and professors increasingly shelve print materials and transition to digital content.
Students must learn how to derive meaningful information from digital content and develop 21st century skills to be prepared for the demands of college and careers in the future. Concept mapping is one method students can use to ensure they are gaining deeper understanding of online material and exercising higher order thinking.
Welcome back to school! Classrooms that were once empty a few weeks ago are now full classrooms with students, backpacks and assignments.
The month of August is significant for many reasons. It marks the beginning of school and the end of summer. It also marks many anniversaries throughout history: the formal signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the 19th Amendment was officially adopted and gave women the right to vote in 1920, Japan surrendering to the United States ending WW II in 1945, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his ‘I Have A Dream’ Speech in 1963, the Woodstock Festival began in 1969, the first compact disc was released in 1982 and the world wide web was introduced in 1991.
This month we launched our online concept mapping environment for individual users, becoming the first concept-mapping tool that integrates seamlessly with a wide range of digital resources. No other products on the market offer semantic analysis of digital content to aid learning and ease-of-use nor present resources side-by-side the mapping canvas. The timing of our kick-off couldn’t have been better.
While we were embarking on a historic journey in edtech, another momentous occasion began in August in Brazil.
It’s our favorite time of year: back-to-school season! For many teachers and students across the country, school is back in session, and many more will be headed to campus in the coming weeks.
As schools have kicked off the 2016-17 school year, we also have launched (out of beta) the new Ideaphora online concept mapping environment for individuals. Our tool helps learners assimilate information from digital content and strengthen higher order thinking skills at a time when schools and districts are transitioning to new learning environments that better prepare students for jobs that don’t exist yet.
At the beginning of the school year, teachers often focus learning activities on self-identity to help build positive self-esteem, a welcoming classroom culture and acceptance among their students. One of the ways educators can introduce this topic while addressing key skills and standards is through concept mapping.
We’re just a month away from launching Ideaphora (out of beta)! In the meantime, we’ve made several updates to our concept mapping environment. Check them out through the new “try-for-free” feature that allows you to take a tour and get started using Ideaphora without registering.