Online Literacy Tools; Mindomo

ED 625 Literacy Tool Modeling

Liam Breathnach

In this assignment I will be working with Mindomo www.mindomo.com. The program helps students  with the construction of diagrams and flow charts. These tools can help differentiate the way students visualize, link and therefore retain material.

The interface for the tool is clean and simple. I found the tools to be quite easy to gain some mastery of. There is a tutorial linked here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmLcA13bsqg. The opening allows for a number of prepared templates, and you choose which basic one you wish to work with. Each heading allows you to drag from it and you can write your sub points or subtopics by clicking on each new opening. You have a tool bar for each which allows you to change shapes, colors, trim, fill and the other usual toys you see in programs like this. I do like that is a similar program to other ones people are likely comfortable with. Bits of Word or Photo Editing programs look similar and makes it more welcoming. Even its color scheme is reminiscent of Adobe. In no time you can build up a web of all the linking parts.

I always try to get students to use mind maps both to start and finish a unit. They can begin with a small mind map and when they finish a unit can create a bigger one. The two can be used as review, but can also give an immediate visualization of the progress that has been made which can aid motivation (Snowman and McCown, 2015). Asking students to create mind maps can be a formative or summative assessment. They can work in groups on these assignments to generate discussion on the links they make, and how they use the tools to review, retain and construct knowledge.

Using mind maps is a great way to show students how to prioritize and synopsize content as mind maps are usually light in text, but have arrows or a flow to show connections, patterns and cause and effect. All of these advantages allow for students of different learning types to maximize their talents (Snowman and McCown). I preach that using techniques like this correctly, means you should be able to condense large amounts of text into a diagram. You should be able to look at the short hand content, but have plenty of associated knowledge for each point. Therefore they make ideal review strategies and are great to quickly glance at, and check your recall before an assessment. Mind maps work well for discussion or debate, and can be a great way of writing quick notes while an activity or talk is going ahead. You can show how the information corresponds to other points and add in more detail to the system later. They also help you remember your key points if you are debating. A glance should be enough to remind you of the main ideas of what you intend to argue about.

Mind Maps are a great way of preparing for a large essay or project. You can start by getting your keypoints down and showing how they link to each other. A couple of bullet points or key words with each major point can give your essay a base to build around quite easily. Also when other points inevitably occur to you they can be added in on you mind map easily. Science is full of difficult language and can be a real struggle especially for English Language Learners. Using a program such as this would allow students to make graphic organizers for all the new vocabulary. Students could put definitions, usual contexts, associated words and others things in to make sure they have a good grasp of how to use the word (McLaughlin 2015). 

It should be noted that as teachers we could benefit from many of the points previously made. We need to make sure that we cover all the important content we wish to assess and mind maps can do that. You could have a mindmap which you show or share with the students, and you could tick off the covered points as you go through them. Students would know where they stand, what the objectives of the unit are and when a likely unit assessment will be. Students will also be able to see what the previous topic and learning a unit is linked with and can begin the process of recalling information learned earlier. This could turn into a preparation exercise where students discuss what they remember and how they think it will be linked with the upcoming section. Students setting expectation for what will be learned and what links may be made could positively affect their engagement and reinforce learning (Mclaughlin 2015).  

I think the main positive for Mindomo is how easy it is to use. The basics of drawing a mind map are simple, and with the drag and drop system of starting sub points it really is intuitive and straight forward. You can also copy and paste things in, which seems small but it allows for quick construction. The tool bars are readily available and have little icons which allow for an easy search.  Once again the symbols seem in keeping with other programs that our students who use iPads will be familiar with. Because it is a webpage it also means you can log on from anywhere and get your material or edit it, which helps its functionality. You can start a new node with a double click and when you do the popular tools pop up as options for immediate editing.

Of course it is not perfect, but what is? Mindomo is pretty one dimensional in that it only works producing mind maps. But this will not worry you if thats what you are looking for. Because of its simplicity there are many features which people will not end up using. The problem is that the free version is limited. The lowest package after that is, the rather inventive, $36 for 6 months. I think you could easily create a large bank of materials within that time and use them over.   

Overall it is not going to revolutionize anything, but as a simple way of producing useful learning tools it really works very well. It is hard to overstate how straight forward it is, with copy and paste, drag and drop and easy sharing all available. These are tools that most people are comfortable with from regular use already and it makes using Mindomo intuitive. I feel as a teacher it would be easy to spend some time going through all your chapters and units creating mind maps for everything. You could have a great library of information built up. Students who like to use mind maps would also benefit from the program and creating lots of sheets diagrams and flow charts to help them build the big picture of the subject and show how common themes and links emerge. Doing that is a goal of teachers if we are to send our students on with a solid knowledge of the content that’s been covered.

Thanks

 

References

McLaughlin, M. (2015). Content Area Reading: Teaching and Learning for College and Career

Readiness. Boston, MA: Pearson.

McCown, R. & Snowman, J. (2015). Psychology Applied to Teaching (14th ed.). Stamford, Connecticut: Cengage Learning