Ideaphora Insights

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.

Why do educators make such a big deal about recognizing patterns of information and organizing facts? These skills are necessary to developing expertise. Expert knowledge goes beyond mere recall of facts to the ability to connect new information to old and create new understandings. John Bransford, an educational psychologist whose findings have centered on these ideas, has gone so far as to say, "Helping students to organize their knowledge is as important as the knowledge itself, since knowledge organization is likely to affect students’ intellectual performance." Focusing on patterns of information (rather than just discrete facts) is also important because these patterns are visual in nature and easily recalled.

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.

We're at it again. We've added numerous enhancements to the Ideaphora knowledge mapping environment to further improve the user experience for teachers and students. These updates are available to beta users and pilot sites as we move closer to the public launch of our subscription-based tool. During the beta testing phase, everyone can use Ideaphora for free.

The product improvements are focused on four areas:

• Tablet support
• Map sharing
• Content
• Classroom management tools (for pilots) 

Just two months ago, we released the beta version of our web-based knowledge mapping environment and asked educators and friends to join us in the journey and share their feedback to ensure we provide teachers and students with the most effective tool for interacting with digital content, such as videos and ebooks, and deepening their understanding of it. During that short time, we've gained valuable suggestions from testers and incorporated their ideas into our product to enhance and improve the experience for learners. Today we've released several updates that you can experience for yourself.

At the Content in Context Conference in June this year, Judson Wagner, Supervisor of STEM, CTE, and Instructional Technology at Brandywine School District in Delaware, explained that his hope for the future of education technology was to provide solutions that enable educators to make students' thinking visible. He expounded that he was seeking ways to evaluate when and how student engagement is translating into learning.