This is part 1 in a series of posts highlighting how mind mapping can be used in education. In this first post we’re going to see how mind mapping can be used as teaching aid.

Trying to capture your students attention and focus? Then why not use mind maps to give them a more visual aid to their learning? By using mind maps, you can capture the interest of your students with something that involves everyone and at the same time conveys information in a more stimulating and short hand medium.

The Same Old Method

The bane of any teachers day is trying to capture the attention and focus of their students. Whether demonstrating mathematical equations or dissecting the plot of a classic novel, teachers often rely on blackboards, whiteboards, and smartboards to explain and educate. More often than not though, the students will be faced with lines and lines of notes put in front of them that they must copy to remember or condense in their own style.

The problem with this is that the students aren’t engaged in any way and therefore act like drones, simply scribbling away what they see in front of them.

In order to involve the students more and capture their interest, we need to give them a way of communicating their ideas through a medium that is recognisable and easy to read. Enter the mind map!

The Big Picture

Probably the easiest way to start introducing mind mapping as a teaching aid, is to use mind mapping to explain topics and subjects by giving them the big picture.

Before a lesson starts, take 5 minutes to quickly mind map out the subject on the board that is going to be covered in the lesson. If your more prepared and technically able, then you could also use mind mapping software and a projector to show the mind map complete with all the visual aids required like coloured keywords and images.

By using this method, you are giving your students a more visual and appealing format that they are more likely to associate with, rather than lines of notes. At the end of the lesson the mind map could be duplicated to a medium suitable for distribution whether it be simple paper or as a digital file that the students can take away.

Class Mind Mapping

The second method involves the class and is best suited to subjects where students can collaborate on a topic or subject.

At the beginning of the lesson, start the mind map with a core topic using an image or keyword. This is the starting point of our mind map. In order to break the students into mind mapping, you might want to take suggestions for the core topic from them.  This gives them a chance to see how mind mapping works.

Next, identify the main topics surrounding the core topic. Add these to your mind map, explaining to the students how these main topics are associated with the core topic.

Once the students have an understanding of how the mind map works, ask each student to approach the mind map and add a keyword or image to a main topic of their choice. The only rule is that each student must add something and it must associate with a main topic.

Finally, take a few minutes to discuss with the students what’s been added to the mind map. You can discuss with the students the associations between topics, and the keywords and images they have added to each topic and their reason why.

This is almost like a brainstorming session except your not asking the students to generate ideas.  Instead your asking them what they know on the topic. It helps students to re-inforce what they know and find out things that perhaps they should know.

As you can see from these examples, mind mapping is a great way for teachers to interact with their students. Not only does it grab their attention, it encourages participation from your students in a way that you might not have thought possible.

In the next part of the series, we’ll be looking at how mind maps can be used as learning aids.

A while back I posted about different mind map recipes that you could use for taking notes from a book and for organising your next actions, GTD style. With these post I didn’t include any examples of the mind maps that could be used in your mind mapping software.

To help people out, I have decided to put together some examples of these mind maps so that you can see how they’re laid out. In each bundle I have included the following:

• A Freemind version of the mind map
• A MindManager version of the mind map
• A MindManager template of the mind map

Here’s how the mind maps look in MindManager along with a link to download each one:

The Book Notes Mind Map

Download The Book Notes Mind Maps

The Next Actions By Context Mind Map

Download The Next Actions By Context Mind Maps

The Next Actions By Project Mind Map

Download The Next Actions By Project Mind Maps

These mind maps are only for you to get started off and are by no means final.  These mind maps should be customised to your particular style of mind mapping so that you get the most out of them.

If you like these mind maps and would like to see more then drop me a comment below.

In my last post about Ruby, I talked about learning the language before the framework and how developers can be more productive in their chosen frameworks by expanding their knowledge of the underlying language it is built from.

When it comes to learning a language, many developers are at ends about what they should develop to learn about a language.  My adivce is just build something.  It doesn’t need to be big and fancy, it just needs to allow you to use areas of the language your perhaps not familiar with.

When I first started to learn about Ruby over a year ago, I hacked together lots of little scripts for managing jobs on my laptop.  The one I use the most though is Binks.  Binks is a little script that aggregates RSS feeds into a single HTML page.  The reason for putting this together is that I didn’t want my Google Reader clogged up with these items as they were only links to other websites with no reading in them at all.

Here’s some of things I picked up while developing Binks:

1. Passing Arguments - If your writing a ruby application for the command line then, chances are you’ll be passing in arguments to application at some point.  In the time I developed Binks, I learned the basics of parsing arguments and some nice features about arrays.
2. YAML - Binks uses a YAML configuration file to read it’s feeds from and some other settings.  YAML files are used extensively in the Rails framework, so I used a YAML file for my application.
3. ActiveRecord - As my application was going to use a database, my first pass at the application consisted of hand-written SQL strings that I executed against a database.  Not very nice to look at.  As I was already familiar with ActiveRecord, I decided to use that in my application.  You might think of ActiveRecord as being something you would only use for Rails applications, but it makes a great database layer for Ruby applications too!
4. Reading RSS - RSS is everywhere and is fast becoming thee internet standard for communicating between websites and applications.  Chances are that in the future I’ll be using RSS at some point.  To keep things simple I looked at the RSS library that comes with the Ruby language.
5. Markaby - As a little treat I wanted to output my aggreagated RSS feeds to HTML, but I didn’t want to code every single tag and class.  This is where I picked up some invaluable tips on using Markaby.  Simply put, Markaby allows you to write HTML as though your writing it in Ruby.

So for just under 150 lines of code I picked up lots of knowledge on Ruby and it’s libraries and gems!  If your new to Ruby and your looking for something to build then why not create your own version of Binks?