Media 21 Student Shares Her Creative Approach to Mindmapping

Earlier this week, I blogged about about first efforts in Media 21 to use mindmapping as a strategy for thinking and inquiry as well as a springboard for discussion in our Fishbowl groups.  One of our creative mindmappers took a few minutes today to share her first two mindmaps that go  outside some of the traditional mediums and how mindmapping helps her as a learner.

Guest Blog Post: Library on Wheels

Library on Wheels is a program that the Sequoyah High School Media Center has been doing for a little over three years now, and we are pleased with the results.  Library on Wheels  is the name we have given to loading a cart with books and a laptop and taking it to the cafeteria.  We try to stock the cart with our latest novels or nonfiction/reference books like Guinness World Records which might appeal to a reluctant reader.   We then wheel the cart around to each table and ask students if they would like to check out a book.  We have been jokingly compared to hospital candy stripers or Brooks Hatlan in Shawshank Redemption, but I think that a flight attendant may be the best analogy.  While not every student  takes advantage of this service, this form of outreach helps us to connect with students we might not normally see during lunch and helps improve the visibility of the library by going to where the students are.

Sequoyah High School has four lunch periods, and our goal is to visit each lunch period once a week.  We find that some students who never darken the doors of the media center will see a book on the cart and choose to check it out.  We also answers many questions, including  questions such as “What time do you close?” and “When is my book due?”   We have found it extremely enjoyable to interact with the kids in a different way outside of our mainstream point of access.  Library on Wheels allows us to see a different side of them.  In addition to checking books out and answering questions, students pay quite a few fines while we are in the cafeteria and also return books.  When you combine all those advantages with increased circulation statistics, the program is a win-win and beneficial for the library program and  for the students.

Jan Reed, Media Specialist
Sequoyah High School
Canton, GA 

ALA Midwinter Meeting 2012, Day 2: The Midwinter Conversation: Transforming Librarianship

Please also check out my blog post for the American Libraries Membership Blog from today as well that spotlights Day 1 of this two day event at ALA Midwinter 2012.

Initiating Inquiry: Mindmapping and Fishbowl Discussions for Connecting and Building Background Knowledge

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Susan Lester’s 10th Honors World Literature/Composition students recently began a novel study of All Quiet on the Western Front.    Since students knew little about World War I, we gave students the opportunity to choose a World War I topic of interest to them ( a menu was provided but students could come up with their own topics, too) to research.  Susan and I decided to help students dwell in the connecting stage of inquiry by having students mindmap their research and then share those findings in a Fishbowl discussion group.  Using mindmaps that Howard Rheingold’s students created and published as our models, we gave students the choice for the tools and mediums they wanted to use to mindmap the key ideas and findings of their research on their topic.  Most preferred creating their mindmaps with concrete materials like paper and ink, but others like using Word or Bubbl.us.

After our Fishbowl meeting and having time to share our mindmaps last Tuesday, students shared their reflections on the effectiveness of mindmaps as a medium for sharing key ideas and information.

• Students were generally quite positive about the process and indicated it was helpful in better discerning important information and big ideas as well as organizing that information; this feedback was encouraging since these were challenges students identified in our research  project last semester.
• Other students shared they felt they were able to initiate and sustain a richer level of participation and engagement as members of their Fishbowls because the mindmap helped them easily remember key ideas they wanted to share and was a quick way to prompt talking points as opposed to looking a written reflection.
• Several students also indicated they felt creating the mindmap helped them better synthesize and remember the information they were finding in their research.
• Some students indicated they would enjoy having the option to create a mindmap rather than always writing a narrative reflection for Fishbowl discussions about their novel/book studies.
• One student shared that the mindmapping helped her feel as though her Fishbowl now had multiple experts on different topics and that the group was able to cover a broader amount of information with more depth; additionally, she thought the mindmap sharing created a different element of fun for the Fishbowl discussion.  She described mindmapping as helping students to create a “3D” perspective about a topic instead of just “brushing the surface with a boring 2D” perspective.

A few students indicated they encountered difficulty in the mindmapping process and in looking at some student mindmaps, we could see others might need some help in the organization of their mindmaps.   For our next mindmapping endeavor, I think I will scaffold their skills by doing a group think and do a group exercise in which we create a mindmap together to help those who are struggling and to grow the skills of those who feel comfortable with that  strategy.  I am also hopeful I can encourage other teachers to try this strategy in other courses and continue to grow my best practices for teaching students mindmapping.

If you are using mindmapping as a tool for building and sharing background knowledge, what strategies or approaches are you taking help students learn this skill and medium?  I encourage teachers, professors, and librarians to share your ideas here in the comments.

ALA Midwinter 2012: My Interview with Stacy Weitzner on Day 1 of Empowering Voices, Transforming Libraries

Here is the edited version of my interview with Stacy from the ALA YouTube Channel:

The uncut version, which features about 3.5 additional minutes of discussion:

Resources:

• Learn more about these two session from ALA Midwinter on Empowering Voices, Transforming Libraries
• Stacy Weitzner’s website
• David Lankes screencast from Day 1 of Empowering Voices, Transforming Libraries
• David Lankes screencast from Day 2 of Empowering Voices, Transforming Libraries