GroupMap-A Good Tool for Boosting Students Visual and Critical Thinking Skills

May 18, 2015
GroupMap is an excellent educational web tool for group brainstorming and decision making. It allows you to create your own map and invite others to contribute to it. GroupMap also provides a wide variety of pre-designed graphic organizer templates that teachers can use with students in class to engage them in critical thinking activities.

GroupMap is also a response system that supports real-time feedback and response collection. Teachers can see each students' contribution and assess it in real time. Teachers can either enable anonymous sharing so students won’t be able to see each others’ ideas or make it open environment with anyone being able to the group contributions. When done, teachers can use GroupMap’s reporting features to :"summarize the entire map instantly into web reports or excel; see how people contributed, and how they rated the activity; and provide evidence and transparency into the decision making process."

Some examples of the graphic organizer templates offered for educators include:

KWL Template:
“Learn a new topic. People can share what they know, decide on what they want to know then reflect on learning.”

Swot Analysis
“Have people add strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. People can prioritize the ideas so you know which are the ones that really matter for your strategic plan.”

Pros and Cons
“Helps teams decide which way to go by creating a ranked list of pros and cons and using dot votes to prioritise.”

KWHLAQ Graphic Organizer
“A planning and reflection graphic organizer for improving student learning. Upgrade your standard KWL to the 21st Century, taking students from recall and inquisitive questioning through to sharing what they have learned and how they will put it into action. “

GroupMap offers a 14 days free trail after which you will have to pay to use the service. Individual teacher subscription is $8/month and school account $1 a year per user.

Watch this video to learn more about GroupMap

Courtesy of Edshelf

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A Very Good List Featuring 40 Questions to Develop Students Reflective Thinking

February 9, 2015
After the popular PBL checklist,  Edutopia has recently shared this wonderful list of reflection questions. The list is realized by Whitfield Career Academy to help students develop and embrace  reflective habits in their work. Reflexivity and self-reflection are two key skills for an optimal learning experience. They allow students to not only critically appraise their learning and identify areas of weakness and strength but also increase their critical awareness of the metacognitive processes involved in their learning. These 40 questions embedded in this list are ideal for enhancing students' metacognitive abilities.

The questions are divided into 4 major categories:

1-Backward looking : 
These questions engage students in  retrospective assessments of their  learning.

2-Inward-looking: 
These ones are meant to help students explore  their inner selves and identify how their learning connects with them as individual learners.

3- Outward-looking:
The questions in this category are designed in such a way that allow students to view their work from an outsider perspective. They enable them to embrace the role of onlooker and assess their work externally.

4- Forward-looking:
These questions build on the previous sets of questions to enable learners to conceptualize their learning for future purposes. And as Dewey stated, an educative experience is one that connects the past with the present to prepare for the future.

The list of these 40 questions are available for free download in PDF format from this page. Enjoy.

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A Very Good Critical Thinking Framework for Teachers and Educators

January 15, 2015
Below is an interesting critical thinking framework I came across through Teachthought. This framework is taken from a journal article written by Robert Duron, Barbara Limbach, and Wendy Waugh and published in International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.The strength of this framework lies in the fact that it is applicable to all disciplines. It is a holistic approach that can be used in various teaching situations to help students develop critical thinking skills.

According to this framework, teachers can integrate the critical component in their instruction through 5 steps: Determining learning objectives, teaching through questioning, practicing before assessment, reviewing, refining and improving, and finally providing feedback and assessment of learning. This 7 pages document (including two gapes of references) provides a very good explanation of this critical thinking framework. It is definitely a must read. Enjoy.


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