Rationale for Mind-Map Review Lesson

I believe that this lesson demonstrates my achievement towards Alberta TQS-2:

Engaging in Career Long Learning and Alberta TQS-3: Demonstrating a Professional Body of

Knowledge. I believe that TQS-2 is strongly demonstrated in this lesson as I worked hard to

ensure that I was ‘maintaining an awareness of emerging technologies to enhance knowledge

and inform practice’. Going into the lesson I had no prior experience to using software to build

mind-maps which necessitated that I put in the time to grow my knowledge about these

programs. I spent a couple of days familiarizing myself with the programs and developed a

lesson plan that would not only teach the students how to use the chosen software but also

would reinforce key concepts that they had learned from chemistry the weeks prior. I also

believe I demonstrated TQS-3 by “[incorporating] a range of instructional strategies, including

the appropriate use(s) of digital technology, according to the context, content, desired outcome

and the learning needs of students” (Alberta Education, 2020) as well as “[incorporating] digital

technology and resources as appropriate, to build student capacity for acquiring, applying and

creating new knowledge”(Alberta Education, 2020).

This lesson found students learning to use a computer software program for dynamically

creating mind-maps. Although I have previously attempted to integrate mind-maps into lessons,

I have always found the students don’t get very engaged with the idea of them. I largely

believed this to be a consequence of written word’s sense of permanence. When creating mind-

maps on paper, the students would be hesitant to write down thoughts as they came to them
because they were afraid to mess up. This limited the potential of connection-based thinking

mind-maps are so useful for. Observing this made me wonder if there was another way to

implement mind-maps and I started to look for online tools that would help erase that

hesitance. After spending a few days tinkering with a few different programs I settled on

Mindmup for its ease of use and ability to export files from the program. I familiarized myself

with the program so I would be able to troubleshoot any problems the students had and then

produced a visual set of steps that would be easy to follow. I then wrote a bank of word that

the students could use to jump off of when creating their mind-maps and used the software on

school computers to ensure it would run. The step-by-step instructions that I produced were

carefully thought out as to be as simple as possible by included both written and visual

instructions to cover all sorts of learners.

When I went to teach the lesson, I first gave a live demonstration of how to use the

program on a projector screen as to provide further visual reinforcement. I fielded questions

from the students as I was demonstrating and made sure to go through the steps multiple

times. I also used a few terms from the word bank as to provide the students with an example

to start off from. When the students were just getting started, I did have to help out with the

use of the program a fair amount, but this only lasted about five minutes. After the students

began to get comfortable with the program they were engaged for the rest of the lesson.

Because of the digital nature of the program I found that the students were much less hesitant

to put down their ideas as they came to them. I would largely attribute this to the fact that a

mistake in this program is able to be corrected by one button push, leading to more
experimentation and rearranging of thoughts. The end products were very impressive, I

certainly did not think that the students would be able to complete the project in one class as I

had anticipated them to have some troubles with the software. This was not the case and the

mind-maps the students created were quite expansive.

Viewing the mind-maps also gave me the great opportunity to have an insight into the

thought processes of the students. I was able to see if they understood the concepts as they

were connected to each other or if they only understood the concepts as individual pieces of

knowledge. This was great to formatively assess the student’s understanding of the chemistry

unit and also gave me the ability to know which topics I would have to review in the future

before they complete their summative assessments. Overall this lesson was a great learning

opportunity for me and gave me great ideas for how to utilize technology into my classrooms

moving into the future.

 References:

Alberta Education. (2020). Teaching Quality Standards.