Thursday, January 26, 2006

Review Activity

I have to give credit to Amanda for this one. In chemistry we are getting ready for the first assessment of the semester. The topic of study is the electron and the Periodic Table. I started by putting the term "electron" on the board in class. Next, I asked the students where we started the study. The first response was one that amazed me. "History" one student said so, I wrote that on the board. Then other students started to chime in with terms and concepts that we have studied in the past three weeks and even from last semester! When all was said and done, we had a list of close to fifty terms on the board. Next, I asked a student to choose a term that was directly tied to "electron" and she picked "orbital" and we connected those terms on the board. We worked together for awhile on this and then I turned it over to them. I explained that if they could make the connections between the material that we were investigating then it might be easier on the test. I also told them that if they could not make the connection then that would help them figure out where to focus their studying.

I cannot belive how this worked, or at least seemed to. I wonder if the students see the value in this type of concept map? I know that they were not happy about doing this at first but the conversations that I overheard were amazing. My goal is to have them do this for each unit of the semester and then for the final we are going to try ot make one big concept map. I hope this goes as well as I think it will...

(To Be Continued...)

4 comments:

Karl Fisch said...

Sounds great. We are (sometime) going to be looking at some concept map software (either Inspiration or a free alternative, CMAP) that might help facilitate this.

Crosby said...

I am glad to hear that this idea worked so well with your students and subject! I was similarly excited when it worked so well for me after Alison told me about her experience with it. I hope to use the idea next week as we get ready for our first US test.

Hatak said...

I would love, okay, really like to find some software that would do this. Is there anything out there that would let you create a word-bank and then allow the learner to make the connection?

Amanda, when are you doing this? I would like to see someone else do it and get some ideas.

Karl Fisch said...

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by a "word bank", but let me show you CMAP (or Inspiration) and see if that does what you want.