Engaging Concept Mapping Activities with Students

1. Post a 3-5 paragraph summary of the 3-5 ideas you explored for how you could use Concept Mapping within your future classroom. Give your specific examples.

A concept map can be used to allow students to organize anything from ideas about a story to organizing a trip the student made. Concepts are not limited to writing but can also be utilized in the areas of math, science, and social studies. Students are able to use template that give them easy access to organization. Templates can consist of mapping out ideas through the use of pictures or by organizing text. In the classroom I could use concept mapping as a way for my students to follow a book I'm reading by mapping out the characters and events. In a science unit concept mapping could be used to track plant growth and the tracking of changing variables. History can be a difficult subject for students to follow, when studying time periods using concept mapping to layout and track events in an organized fashion can help students not feel overwhelmed by dates and years.

1. Discuss what you see as the impact of the use of Concept mapping within your classroom might have on student learning? Give some details to support your statements.

Concept mapping would be an extremely beneficial tool to any classroom. I think it can be really easy for students to feel overwhelmed with all the new information they are learning. If students were given a means to organize these lessons and their thoughts together they might not only grasp concepts better and faster but would have a great reference. Concept mapping however might not work with all students' learning styles however, they can't hurt a student when making one. I dont see how it would harm any student's learning by having him or her use concept maps, granted for some students there is probably a more beneficial tool to use with them but this tool I can see easily benefit everyone, just some more then other.

1. Discuss some criteria that you would use to decide whether or not Concept Mapping activities would be part of a lesson for your students.

If there is a lesson filled with a lot of information that connects together and has to be followed (such as a story plot line or serious of historical events) this would lead me to most likely use a Concept Mapping activity. Where there are a lot of dates, events, people, to follow in a lesson it is good to track them through some sort of tool, Concept Mapping being one of them. If learning and understanding can obviously be made easier through a concept mapping activity then I'll obviously use it. If I know that it could work but I'm questioning how much benefit the students will actually get out of using one, I'd most likely wouldn't use on in that case.


Here is an example of a concept map I created as a representation of a Trip to a Zoo.