Ideaphora Insights

We are pleased to announce the winners of the Ideaphora Connecting Knowledge Grants. After careful review, the judging panel has selected three well-deserving educators:

• $1,500 grant winner: Mike Jones, STEM instructor and technology coach, Bloomington School District 87, Bloomington, Illinois

• $500 grant winter: Kayley Bowie, middle school teacher, Crestomere School (Wolf Creek Public Schools,) Alberta

• $500 grant winner: Christi Collins, second grade teacher, Wise Primary School (Wise County Public Schools) Wise, Virginia

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. 

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.

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

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! 

Teachers and students can now take advantage of a broader range of open education resources in Ideaphora using PDFs and images. Ideaphora continually rolls out new features and enhancements based on our product road map and feedback from our users. Our goal is to enable teachers and students to use any digital content as source material and multimedia resources for their knowledge maps to provide a more enriching, visual, flexible, and meaningful learning experience. However, to ensure the most accurate and appropriate keywords are generated for the best possible learning experience, we must address different types of resources in various stages to adapt our semantic analysis engines to how best to work with them. Watch out for more coming soon!

This week we've enabled our technologies to deconstruct uploaded PDFs into relevant concepts that are automatically presented as keywords for users to drag and drop into their knowledge maps. We've also provided a way for users to easily grab images from resources already provided in Ideaphora, including PDFs and Wikipedia articles, as well as by simply copying and pasting images from other online sources, into their maps. 

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

In an earlier post, we explored the importance of dual coding in learning and retention. In short, when information is encoded in the brain both visually and verbally (that is, in the kinds of maps we create using Ideaphora) learning is enhanced. Dual coding facilitates making connections, understanding relationships, and recalling related details. Related to dual coding theory is John Sweller’s (1994) “cognitive load” theory. Sweller states that information may only be stored in long-term memory after first being attended to, and processed by, working memory.

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

In my previous post, I explained that reading depends on three cueing systems. As students create knowledge maps of the text they encounter, they not only break down meaning, but also encode it in their memories using all three cueing systems. There's more, though. Ideaphora's visual/verbal mapping environment helps learners tap into the power of dual coding, a cognitive theory proposed by Alan Paivio. Let me illustrate.

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

It’s become a truism in education that every teacher is a teacher of reading. Sadly, that sentiment is more wishful thinking than it is a reality. While most teachers recognize that their students need support as they encounter increasingly difficult texts across the curriculum, very few of us have had intensive instruction in reading pedagogy.