Ideaphora Insights

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 19^th 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.

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.

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.   

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. 

This post is written by Mary Chase, Ph.D., an expert in curriculum design, literacy education, and technology integration. 

The skies are blue, the temperatures are edging up and summer is poised on the horizon: it’s that great time of year when we take down our bulletin boards and break out our (metaphoric) surfboards. There’s nothing better than those first days of vacation when our minds drain of the agendas and administrivia of the classroom, and it’s okay to pick up a book with a plot instead of a matrix of standards.

That feeling doesn’t last forever, though. After about three weeks, I get bitten by the teaching bug again. I remember the faces of all those students who never quite engaged, who might have excelled but didn’t, and I start wondering what I can do in the coming fall to address their needs. That’s when I do a different kind of summer reading—titles from the annals of pedagogy. My favorite kind of education book is passionate, based on experience in the trenches and reflective of what the writers believe about learning, not the “how to” books of which there are so many. Here are a few of my favorites:

Ideaphora is now available in the Edmodo Store! Teachers and students can easily access and use our concept mapping tool through Edmodo’s single sign-on experience and automatic class rostering.

Edmodo users seeking to use Ideaphora in their classroom can simply click to install our application from Edmodo Spotlight and enjoy automatic and quick access. Teachers can select one or more of their classes that are already set up within the Edmodo platform to give their students access to Ideaphora and begin assigning them concept mapping activities to support personalized learning. Educators can also log into Ideaphora from our home page using their Edmodo credentials.

This post is written by Mary Chase, Ph.D., an expert in curriculum design, literacy education, and technology integration. 

Years ago, when I first entered the classroom, I thought I knew my subject area and I thought I knew how to teach. You won’t be surprised to learn that, while my head was stuffed with facts and learning strategies, I really knew nothing about either area. Dewey teaches that we learn by doing and that is nowhere more true than in the field of teaching. Further, all my training, all the demands of my job and the expectations of my administrators, parents and students were defined by curriculum. Nobody said much about learning, let alone thinking.

Later, in graduate school, I discovered the work of cognitive psychologist, Vera John-Steiner, and her works became seminal to my own ideas about the role of thinking in education. John-Steiner’s first contribution to the field, Notebooks of the Mind: Explorations of Thinking, centered on the cognitive habits of geniuses from science, art, writing, music—all of the humanities—based on a close analysis of their journals, personal accounts and conversations. Leo Tolstoy, Marie Curie, Diego Rivera—over 50 geniuses account for their creative visions. Her investigation is accompanied by her own insights on the nature of thinking. She writes, “Thought is embedded in the structure of the mind. One way to think of this structure is to view it as formed by networks of interlocking concepts of highly condensed and organized clusters of representations.”

This post is written by Mary Chase, Ph.D., an expert in curriculum design, literacy education, and technology integration. 

I read today that there are more than a billion websites on the Internet. The mind boggles. When I look back on my own education, I remember thinking that my library’s card catalog and the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature comprised the pinnacle of responsible research. Later, I graduated to the more sophisticated Social Sciences Citation Index and other complex databases; nevertheless, my resources were paper and my access limited to library hours and collections.

Ideaphora is guided by the mission to help students build critical thinking skills and lasting knowledge from the digital content they are increasingly exposed to in and out of school by offering a first-of-its-kind concept mapping and learning environment. The strength of learners' knowledge maps depends on the quality of the content they use as sources to create connections among concepts. To that end, Ideaphora is seeking the best open education resources (OER) to provide a robust library of materials that educators and students can use in building their knowledge maps. We want to hear from you!