Online Mindmapping

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What feautures should a mind mapping tool have? 

For complete creativity I'm not sure you can beat a whiteboard and pen, but to save your ideas, share them with others and collaborate across large distances I think there is a place for electroninc tools. So have a look at Mindmeister - I came across it recently. You can embed (see above) invite others to collaborate by email and save and export to a wide range of formats including pdf.

Wiki happiness

What is a wiki?

I have to confess I am often finding it hard to explain, and I have been developing one for use over the past week or so.

Often we seem to see wikis as blank pages ready to be filled with factual information as in wikipedia but how useful is that to a teacher or a pupil in school?

I have been thinking of it in terms of teachers collaborating on documents together. For instance if teachers are standardising their assessments in a secondary school department, it might be nice to discuss what we mean when we give a key stage 3 student a level 5. We might even want to link to an example of level 5 work. Others may want to refine the definition given. Hmm.

To do that it needs structure. Not that the structure has to stay fixed, it can be adaptable but it must have a starting point. So I have been creating skeletons of wikis for others to use. Assessment for staff - research based wikis for students with particular topics identified, links already made and so on.

I will have to wait for the feedback (I can't post a link as they are all behind passwords!)

Webquests for Science

Webquests are a really good idea. Sometimes it can be a bit of a kop out to say to a class. 'Use the internet to research...' whatever. A webquest is more directed yet still encourages independent learning and evaluation of sources and all the good things about general research tasks. It is also easier to set up assessment criteria.

There are a few good ones on the ideasaboutscience.com website that address one of the more difficult to teach aspects of the GCSE Science courses. It would not take long to make your own however. If you are using a learning platform you could put it on your classes homepage and have some resources in Word format for example for the students to write in their findings. You could then ask them to submit this to you for marking through the learning platform where the assessment criteria are available for them to look and give them the opportunity to ask questions to you through a forum set up for this purpose.

It would be quick to set up. Even quicker if you used content material someone else had produced!

embedit.in

If you want to put a document such as a Word, Excel or PowerPoint file OR a website snapshot into another webpage, you will probably need some kind of widget to help. Enter embedit.in. Check this out - it is an A Level Physics revision website I might want to point my students to...

The only problem I have found so far is that it is not compatible with mac iWork files, but that only applies to macheads...