Any Cmap (Collaborative Concept Mapping) Users Here?

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Permalink Reply by Deborah Keanini on December 5, 2008 at 11:39pm

Thank you Tammy for sharing your son's concept maps. They are wonderful. I have wanted to incorporate concept mapping into my biology curriculum for a while now, but didn't know quite where to start. I had no idea that there was free software out there that could make everything so much easier! I just joined cmaps and even though I have not gotten a chance to do much more than look at what others have done, but I am really impressed so far. I can't wait to see what my students can do. I'd be interested in knowing how any of you began to introduce this way of learning to your students. I did an informal "hands up" survey in one of my classes and only 4 of 24 of my 9th graders had even heard of concept maps.
Mahalo,
Deborah

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Permalink Reply by Tammy Moore on December 6, 2008 at 6:18am

My students are from all over the U.S., Canada, and one family from Brazil. We do a Cmap workshop in our online classroom periodically throughout the year. I keep meaning to VoiceThread the slides but have not yet gotten around to recording the presentation. If you are interested, I can set up a one-on-one workshop with you in our onlline classroom or send you an invite to our next official presentation (probably in January for the new students coming in to my 2nd semester classes).

Now that you have the software you can access my family root folder through Cmap. This will let you see the file structure we have set up and let you more easily access all the maps we have vs accessing them via the html pages. WE have other families Cmapping too, but I would need to get their permission before I reveal which folders are theirs. You can even change or add to our maps which will make a version of the map for your own folder (it doesn't change our original unless we set you up as a collaborator - which I can do if you want to see how that works). You can access our Cmaps while running the software by navigating to the 'Shared Cmap in Places' icon that you will see in the left sidebar of that first main window (Views window). It will populate with all the public servers that are online. Our maps are on the' IHMC Public Cmaps (2)' server. Double-click that one to see all the Cmap folders on that server. Our folder's name is armoorefam. Double-click again and you can browse around at all that we have there.

You can make it easy to navigate to your student folders if you decide to have the kids make their own root folders verses one classroom folder to place all their Cmaps into. Just have them tell you where they are set up and what their folder name is. You navigate to it and drag and drop their folder to the 'Favorites' icon in the Views Window. You can give that a try with our family Cmap root folder to get a feel for how that works and to make it easy to access ours while you are getting the feel for how to set up your own. Then, whenever you start up Cmap just always click the Favorites icon to get to where you want to go. One note - if you upgrade with a new version you will want to have a written record of where folders are because the favorites don't seem to repopulate on their own in new versions). I learned that the hard way and lost track of several families that began using Cmaps from past workshops. I regret that because I was curious to see what percentage of them continue on and how much they use them over the years. I know for us they are big hit. We have added to ours every week for years because these really click with my kids for study tools (visual learners love them). Several of my students have commented that they make their own while they work through their text then they go to see mine and other students' maps and compare notes. (Cmap has a compare tool built in). They have also commented that on occassion they don't have time to Cmap when they are reading through their text 9skimming), but that by looking at other student Cmaps they get feel for what areas they didn't read carefully enough because the maps have details they missed or just did not remember. Then they know what to go back and drill down on.

My e-mail addy is armoorfam@centurytel.net. E-mail me so that I have your contact information so we can set up for you to meet with me in the online classroom for a tour of Cmaps. I have application sharing in there, so it is a great way to lower the learning curve.

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