Ideaphora Insights

Mike Jones, our Connecting Knowledge Grant winner and a STEM instructor and technology coach in the Bloomington School District 87 (Illinois), shares his insights on using Ideaphora in the classroom. 

Formative assessments by the literary definition are pieces of data that allow teachers to measure where our students are at in their learning continuum.  While it is easy to measure the more rote knowledge with short answers or multiple choice quizzes, finding ways to assess their understanding can be much more difficult.

I use the Ideaphora concept mapping environment in my classroom to allow my students to document and share their learning. When I first started using concept mapping, I mistakenly thought of it as a “one and done” activity. I would assign a resource and have students complete a concept map due the next day. Now, building a single concept map is a reflective process that we revisit often during a unit.

Mike Jones, our Connecting Knowledge Grant winner and a STEM instructor and technology coach in the Bloomington School District 87 (Illinois), shares his insights on using Ideaphora in the classroom. 

In simplest terms, the goal of science is to answer a question, regardless of the source.  Often, this is done by introducing students to phenomena, which can be an event, piece of media or another item that helps students generate a question.  It is the investigation of that question that allows for concept mapping to be a powerful tool in science inquiry, one of the three dimensions of learning in the Next Generation Science Standards.