Glogster Works for Visual Organization

Glogster is a free, snazzy-looking, online poster-making tool that can be used to organize information visually. I had to create an assignment for a Media Literacy Institute I attended this year using social media tools. I used Glogster for the front part, incorporating an Xtranormal video explaining the assignment, then showing the phases of the assignment (finding, evaluating, and using information ethically) graphically, and ultimately linked out to an example of a finished assignment. I used Prezi for this (also a great free tool for visual organizers) and featured Screenr and Evernote. I thought it looked pretty cool and covered the assignment well.

Click on the following link, then follow the arrows. At the end, the Glog should link to the Prezi where you'll have to advance manually, clicking on the triangle.

http://margaretmontet.glogster.com/il-assignment/

VoiceThread

I have just discovered VoiceThread, a free online cool tool to use for discussions about images and video. This is my new favorite, and I've started discussions on my concept map and my knowledge map used in my mind map sabbatical project: http://voicethread.com/share/1199512/.

The maps are not new, but I still hope you check them out if you haven't been to my mind mapping LibGuide (http://bucks.libguides.com/mindmaps). I'm curious how effective you think VoiceThread is for discussing images like mind maps and such. I think it is very effective. The first time I saw this tool, it was being used to discuss fine art. That worked very well, too.

Please leave comments on the VoiceThread site or here if you prefer.

The Back of the Napkin

The human brain thinks and imagines naturally in pictures. As children, we communicate with pictures and have no inhibitions about drawing. As we grow older, we become more comfortable with language and most people become less confident about their drawing skills. Dan Roam, author of The Back of the Napkin, believes that we never lose the ability to understand concepts and ideas conveyed with pictures, and that we can use very simple drawings to explain ideas and influence decision makers. In this book, he breaks down his process, or toolkit, for solving problems and selling ideas with pictures by using the same process he is teaching.

First he explains the process of Look-See-Imagine-Show where we analyze the idea and decide how to show it. Then we proceed to the SQVID analysis where we decide where our picture will fit on one or more continuums: simple/elaborate, qualitative/quantitative, vision/execution, individual/comparison or change/status quo. Next is The Six Ways We See, where we decide how to present the idea: who/what (picture), how much (graph), where (map), when (timeline), how (flowchart) and why (plot). Here is my Napkin-inspired flowchart of the book:

More than one choice from the SQVID and The Six Ways We See can be incorporated into our graphic in order to represent or sell our idea. (Notice that the first continuum in the SQVID analysis is simple/elaborate.)

I like this book and started using its process to graphically represent my own concepts before I had gotten halfway through. Here's a timeline explaining information literacy that I am hoping will inspire and illuminate college students:

Mind maps are useful for almost anything, but over the course of this project I began to feel a need for a way to show time and process. This is it.

Mind Maps to the Rescue

Mind maps have come to my rescue again. This time I was struggling to become proficient with some complicated (to me) educational stuff for a meeting where I might have to actually speak with knowledge. In prior meetings with this group I had experienced the uneasy feeling that everyone could speak this unfamiliar language but me. Of course, it wasn't a different language--it was English with a whole lot of jargon.

In advance of the meeting where I might have to speak, I created a mind map which included what I felt to be the important points and vocabulary. I linked similar items and relationships. Then I studied it every day. The initial process of organizing the information and creating the mind map helped me assimilate the information, too.

I only shared the mind map with one person from that group who also admits his facility with the concepts and jargon is less than what he would like. His experience will be different with a ready-made mind map, (from mine because I created it), but as he's also a visual learner, I think it might help.

I am reminded of another time I was stuck for a way to communicate a multifaceted idea of mine. The idea was to be communicated visually rather than verbally or with text only. This would be a poster session with a display on that tri-fold science fair cardboard sold at craft and office supply stores. This should have been a no-brainer for a lover of mind maps like me, but it took about a week of rumination before it dawned on me. I made the mind map in the shape of an apple tree with the main concept on the trunk. The branches each represented a higher-level subconcept, and the leaves and apples represented the next level of detail. It worked intellectually and the browns, greens and reds grabbed the attention of attendees at the event.

The moral of these stories is this: mind maps are not only organization and memory tools. they are dynamic methods for learning, teaching and communication, whether in the form of an apple tree or in a complex computer-generated diagram. Save information, brainstorm it, learn it, and communicate it.

P.S. There are no pictures in this post because I don't know what happened to the Apple Tree Mind Map, and this week's education example, although in technicolor, is probably one of the least visually appealing I have ever made. And my scanner is ill.