Mindmap

Intro

The Mindmap activity provides with a brilliant tool to encourage students to collaboratively brainstorm and contribute to the free flow of ideas ideas around a topic.

Mindmaps can be individual (each student in the lesson develops his/her own mindmap) or collaborative - a group of students develop the mindmap each contributing and adding to each others' ideas.

Why do I want to use Mindmap?

1. Focus students' attention on a particular topic

2. Generate a quantity of ideas

3. Introduce the practice of idea generation and collection prior to tackle a problem.

4. Provide an opportunity for students to share ideas and expand their existing knowledge by building on each other's contributions.

Educational Insight

As Mindmaps help students focus on free flow idea generation without criticism or judgement. It's important to emphasise to students to accept and respect for individual differences.

When used effectively, mindmaps help students to organise their thoughts and understanding as well as to highlight relation between concepts that might not have been clear before hand.

Mindmaps help students see the whole picture.

What can I use Mindmaps for?

Mindmaps are phenomenal to engage in free flow idea generation. When managed right, mindmaps can be powerful tools to help student understand relationships and see the big picture.

Pedagogies that use Mindmap: Problem Based Learning, Reciprocal Learning, etc.

How does it work?

You (teacher) provide students with central topic and basic instructions for students on how to conduct the activity.

Mindmaps can be set to be individual or team collaboration - depending on how you want the to develop their ideas.

Students then can create and link ideas between different mindmap nodes.