Using mind-maps to organise your ideas

9/26/2011

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Today, you're learning about why planning is so important, and how to organise your ideas better

By the end of the session, you'll understand:
  • why planning is so important
  • how mind-mapping can help you revise

Mind mapping is a great tool to help you revise. It's kind of like what we call a thought shower or a spider diagram but organised. And it's the organisation that makes the difference. Most people don't organise their spider diagrams, so they're just like big, crazy, disorganised lists in a completely random order. 

When we organise ideas, we make links in our brain. A link is like a little footpath from one bit of information to another. The more we use it, the more defined it becomes. Our brain has billions of neurons which create synaptic links - the scientific name for these footpaths from one bit of information to another.
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When we get a new bit of information, we store it away. When we need to access it, the better the connection, the bigger the footpath, the easier it is to access. The more we tread that pathway, and the more ways we access the information, the easier it is to recall. Mind-mapping helps that. Mind-mapping is great for planning essays, organising your revision and studying for exams. Paper mind-mapping is fine. It helps you bring everything together. It's good for visual learners and proper mind-mapping helps you organise the chaos. You can colour-code things, you can organise your information. Use flipchart paper and you can get a whole topic on there in one go. Online mind-mapping takes it up a notch. You can:

  • link up with your friends and mind-map together
  • link to files, video, sound, pictures
  • add images
  • see your mind-map grow
  • annotate it
  • add notes
  • build on it
  • access it anywhere if you have a computer or smartphone and a connection
This means you don't have to store it in your head and you can look at it again to refresh your memory - kind of like a priority pass to get past a traffic jam. Instead of sitting waiting for your brain to process everything you want from it and find everything and open up every single synaptic footpath to every single bit of information, a mind-map waves an Access All Areas pass and brings them all up simultaneously. Cool!
Mind42 is great, free software to do this. It allows you to collaborate - so your friends, teachers, students or colleagues can add to it. You can use it on a whiteboard or an ipad as it works with most things. It's also got some great functionality so you can add notes and diagrams and images. Best of all, it's free and it's available on whatever computer you're using when you log on!
The thing it's best at is gathering facts and information. So if you have to revise a knowledge-based subject, it's great for adding lots of information. Here's a simple one I started to help revise An Inspector Calls  for an exam. You can colour-code it. You can publish it. You can distribute it. What more do you want?
Good for:
  • Individual revision of factual subjects
  • Group work over lots of computers
  • Quick recall
  • Making links
  • Improving your revision
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Writing to Inform

9/19/2011

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Today you are learning about presentation and thinking about the devices or techniques we can use to enhance the effect of our writing. 


By the end of the session, you should be able to 
  1. comment in writing on the range of different ways that writers use presentation in different texts
  2. explain in writing how the presentation features create specific effects
  3. analyse in writing how meaning is given through presentation


Presentation is everything. If you don't get the reader's eye, you have failed. In this presentation-first world, catching the eye and keeping the reader hooked are the two things your presentation should do. 

But... you can use presentation in a much more subtle way. If you're really clever, you can find much more gentle ways of getting your ideas across. 

Writing never happens in isolation. It's important to check out what happens in the real world. What's more important is to think about what is important for you. 
  • What's the purpose of your writing?
  • Who are you writing for? 
It's also important to think about the presentation of your work. Gone are the days when people will read things that are too small, without pictures, unhelpfully presented or confusing. 

Make a list like this one of the aspects of presentation you can see in the type of text you want to present. Then put them into rank order. Which are the most important? Re-arrange your list so that the most important features are at the top. Cut and paste the list as you go. 

Then think about why they are used. Each of these aspects (on a website anyway!) is expensive to produce and is a long way from very early websites. Websites used to be about content. Now they are about how they are presented. 

Do a google search for your name or a hobby that you're interested in. Look at the first 10 results returned. Which is the best site? Why? What is it about the presentation that works best? What doesn't work? 

Now you have identified all the conventions of the presentation. The conventions are just the regular things you'd expect to see. Like the conventions of a fairy story are 'Once Upon a Time', talking animals or wicked witches, young children in danger and wicked stepmothers, everything has a convention - a tradition - things you expect to see. These things make it what it is. 

Once you have determined what is there, you need to think about why it is there - what does it do? Why do we have headlines, why do we have subheadings? What do the pictures do? Add this to your spreadsheet. 

To move on you'll be thinking about:
  1. comparing and contrasting the effects achieved by different writers in different texts
  2. evaluating how effective the presentation is
  3. commenting on how the presentation links to the main ideas or purpose of the text

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