Engaging Students with Concept Mapping Activities

My Ideas:
1. Students could use concept mapping to do a report about the Solar System.
2. Concept mapping could be used as a prewrite assignment for an upcoming essay.
3. Students could use concept mapping to do a project about the human body and its differnt systems.
4. Students could use a concept map to do a character analysis of a character from a novel read in class.

Concept mapping can engage students in their learning because it adds a new, fun element to whatever they are learning. They will be able to put their own twist on a project by designing their own concept map. Examples are, if a student was doing a report about a historic figure, they could use a concept map to inform about important things about that person. Another example, students could become more engaged by using a concept map for an essay assignment because it would be a good way for them to organize their thoughts while getting the chance to use a computer as something other than a word processor.

Concept mapping gives the students a different way to demonstrate their understanding, because it allows them to arrange their ideas visually the same way that they organize them cognitively. This could be very helpful to students who struggle with expressing their ideas.