In this video I'm going to show you a little bit about concept maps and you
can see an example here from parts of speech. And a concept map is a way to
visually show how things are related, and you can see that it's made up of shapes
and lines and text labels. And the branches show different relationships.
The lines show connections and there's also different words you can use for the
different shapes (so "nodes"). A flowchart is a particular kind of content map; it has
very specific shapes that are used that have different meanings. You might also
hear the words "mindmap" which is, um, sometimes more of a brainstorming type
of a thing, but they're all very similar and there's a lot of tools you can use
to create them. I'm going to show you a few tools in Microsoft that you could
use in Word or PowerPoint. I'm in Microsoft Word right now for the PC and
I'll show you how you can use those tools and also Google Drawings has a way
you can do similar things. Web 2.0 tools including bubbl.us [and] Lucidchart. There's
all kinds of tools out there. If you'd like to use one of those, just be
absolutely sure to use the free version. Definitely do not pay for anything. And
if you are struggling with how to then take this finished concept map (no matter
what tool you use) and bring it back into your document, you probably will want to
just go ahead and use the screen capture tool that comes with your operating
system. So whether you're on a Mac or a PC you have some kind of a snipping tool
and on a PC it looks like this. And I'm just going to click "new" and whatever
I've drawn, no matter what tool I've used, I can copy it I can save it as a JPEG or
a PNG (and I'm actually no going to save this one) and then if I wanted to insert it,
I would just go to Insert Picture and put it into my document . So that is
probably going to be the easiest way no matter which one of these tools that you
use. If you are using the Microsoft Word tools you could just do it (I'm just
going to go to a new page here) you could just do it right here in Microsoft Word
And basically there's a couple different ways to do it.
One way you can do it manually is just by manually drawing some shapes and you
can right click and add text. And your main concept would go in the center and
then you would branch out from there so you could draw connecting lines and draw
additional shapes to show the different sections. Notice the drawing tools that
appear that give you all kinds of different options... so there are again
under Insert all kinds of different shapes and when you...as soon as you do
that, you get the drawing tools. I'm going to go to another page here in Word and
show you another way that might be even easier and that is also under Insert.
It's called SmartArt and so SmartArt has a couple, well, has a lot of different
diagrams but it has a couple that look like concept maps. So maybe the cycle would
work for your purposes and also maybe the hierarchy you might be able to find
there. So the way I use this typically is to choose one (and you can always change
your mind) so you choose one and you get started. And you can just type in your
main information over here. I find it easy to do it over there. You can also
close that if you don't want to use that and just type right in here.
And if you want to get that back you click on this little arrow there. So this
is kind of nice because you could always change your mind once you've typed in
your information. You could not only change the colors and the design of it,
but you could actually see what it looks like in a couple different formats. So
these are all of the cycle ones but you can actually click on this down arrow
and go to more layouts and even, you know, change it to a hierarchy one and see see
what that might look like. So that is going to be a pretty easy way to do it
but it just depends on your interest and your topic which one might work for best
for you. I have demonstrated how to do this
in Microsoft Word but if you were using PowerPoint, for example, it would be the
same. The same tools exist in PowerPoint. I'm going to switch over here to Google
Drive. When you go to "New" and you click "more" in my case then there are some
other options. So Google Drawings is going to be similar to the features I've
just shown you. So basically you can insert different shapes and lines and
text and so on to build something in Google Drawing. So hopefully one of those
options will work for you to create your concept map. And this is going to be, I
think, a useful skill for you because content maps are very handy for for
instructing and also, you know, assessing students...so both teacher centered and
student centered! Lots of uses for concept maps!
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