Farewell

 

Today I am writing my last post of this learning diary. These months have flown by... The classes have been intense, even though they were just two per week I felt engaged and wanting to learn as much as I could. The resources and tools we have learnt about are diverse, useful and engaging, so I could not be happier!

In February I was ready to learn a lot of ICTs and now that it is May and this subject (and the whole masters) is over, I know so many things that I need to organise them. Therefore, I created this amazing mindmap to organise everything I learnt. I used Coggle as it was my favourite resource of the whole subject. I have included all the resources we have used, an example of my work and some relevant ideas of each one.

The first ones that deserve appreciation are my classmates. I learned a lot from their posts and this masters wouldn't have been the same without them. The idea of creating a learning diary in the shape of a blog facilitated this task, as I was able to engage with my classmates. Moreover, having to create a Twitter account will help me keep in contact with them and their discoveries for life!

Lastly, I would like to thank Francisco for his amazing teaching style: facilitating our learning and acting as a guidance. YOU ARE AN AMAZING TEACHER! This is his Twitter account, I highly reccomend following him.

Follow @franciscogongal

Don't forget I'll keep on posting theacher-related things in my blog and my Twitter!

Follow @martyteachlearn Visit my blog

4.2 Design a mindmap for an educational project

Arrows, pictures, text boxes and a lot of colour as a way to organise ideas.

Mindmaps are an amazing tool, specially for learning. In my case, I wanted to make a project to learn the vital function of nutrition in Natural Sciences. The tool I used is coggle. This is an online plattform that allows the user to create mindmaps, even collaboratively! In my case, I used it to create a mindmap to be used collaboratively between the teacher and the students.  

The students from 6th grade would be divided in 4 teams and be given access to this mindmap. Using the links provided, their task is to complete their part of the mindmap, adding branches and categories if necessary. 

Critical questions and problems encountered

I felt completely lost at the beginning, the only thing I saw in my screen was this:

My intuition told me to click on the square right at the middle of the screen, I did it and I started playing with the features: 

The A symbol allows you to edit the text (bold, italics, how it is alligned and images), the link allows you to link websites, the image is for adding images and the lightning symbol lets you add emojis.

Discoveries

When I was halfway done, I discovered that you can change the colour and shape of the branches and the text boxes clicking with the right button. That was a huge discovery, as I am a very visual person and I rely a lot on colour. However, the options are limited for the free version. 

Uses or connections

The example I gave provides a great use for this tool, allowing for cooperative work between students. However, it is not necessary to have ICT resources in the classroom to use mindmaps; for example, they can be created by the teacher leaving blank spaces, print them and hand them in to complete during class. 

Another use is as a student myself, you can organise group works or your own projects thanks to this tool, facilitating visualisation of the whole picture.

Martyrating

🌙🌙🌙🌙🌙

Pros: 

• Collaborative work.
• Links and pictures can be added.
• Text size personalisation.
• Moving branches and text.

Cons: 

• Limited range of colours and shapes for the free version.
• It is hard to get the hang of it at first.

That was it for today's post!