Personal Technology Project - MindMeister

For my personal technology project, I learned how to use MindMeister to create concept maps to help students brainstorm and plot out their ideas visually before they start writing. I used concept mapping in a lesson plan to help students brainstorm their ideas before writing a persuasive essay.

The lesson plan is as follows:

Concept Mapping Lesson Plan

PLANNING


Date: December 1, 2009 Class and Grade Level: 9th Grade English

Title/Subject of Lesson: Using Concept Mapping to Brainstorm about Young Love

Objectives:
Students will be able to explain the pros and cons of young love
Students will be able to decide whether or not they are for or against young love
Students will be able to prewrite and brainstorm by creating a concept map
Students will be able to list reasons on their concept map supporting why they are either for or against young love
Students will be able to use their concept maps to write a persuasive essay on why young love is either good or bad


State (or District) Core Curriculum Standard(s):
Standard 2, Objective 2a

Concept(s) to Be Taught:

Concept mapping/brainstorming
Persuasive Writing

Materials Needed:
Concept map transparency (created from mindmester.com)
“Young Love: Yes or No” Concept Map Sheets (created from mindmester.com)
Blank concept map sheets (created from mindmeister.com)

Strategies to Be Used:
Group Discussion
Modeling
Concept Mapping

PERFORMING

Announcements: None

Continuation from Previous Lesson: We’ve been reading Romeo and Juliet, a play about two of the most famous young lovers of all time. We’ve also been learning about the elements of effective persuasive writing. Now the students are going to need to decide whether they are for or against young love and, using a concept map they’ve created, they will need to write a persuasive essay that convinces their readers that the opinion or stance they’ve taken on young love is the right one.

Lesson Presentation:

A) Getting Started:
· Ask students how many of them are fourteen years old or older
· Ask students who have any personal sources of income (paper route, allowance, mowing lawns, babysitting, part-time job, etc.) to raise their hands
o Ask those who raised their hands if the amount of mone they make from those jobs is enough to support a family or be self-sufficient
· Now ask students if they think it’s okay for people younger than eighteen to get married (it is legal in Utah to get married at age sixteen with parental permission)
· How about younger than sixteen?
· How about at age fourteen?
· Discuss the fact that, although Romeo and Juliet were both fourteen when they married, their love stories is one of the most enduring of all time
· Pose the culminating questions: is young love good or bad? Is it acceptable or unacceptable? Why?
· Ask each student to decide whether or not they think young love is a good or bad thing and write their decision down on a piece of paper
o Give them adequate time to do this

B) Directing the Learning:
· Put a concept map transparency on the overhead and tell students that the question posed is a tricky one and so we are going to practice a way that will help us be able to think of reasons to support our opinions (either for or against young love)
· Fill out the concept map transparency about a different issue the class proposes (i.e. whether or not school should start at 8 a.m. or 10 a.m.)
o Show students that you put the main issue in the middle and then have supporting reasons branching out from the middle section
o Model this so they understand how concept mapping works
· Pass out the example concept map sheet illustrating how someone who thinks young love is a good thing might web about their opinion on a concept map in order to expand their ideas and come up with supporting details and reasons
o Model this enough that students know how to concept map themselves (at least on a basic level)

Assignment:

1. Guided Practice
· Pass out the blank concept map sheets and have students write in the middle bubble whether they think young love is a good or bad thing
o Ask them to then write four main reasons why they think young love is good or bad in the four bubbles branching out from the middle one
o Then have students write three supporting details to back up their four main reasons of why young love is either good or bad
§ Walk around while students do this to make sure they understand the concepts and to see if they have any questions
2. Homework
· Ask students to use their concept maps to write a rough draft of a persuasive essay (employing the elements of effective persuasive writing that we’ve talked about in previous class periods) that convinces their readers that the stance they’ve taken on young love is the right one
o Encourage students to use the supporting details they included on their concept map to back up their opinion and be more persuasive
· Pass out a writing assignment sheet that explains all of the assignment’s details and provides models of persuasive essays for students to refer to

C) Bringing the Lesson to a Conclusion:
· If time allows, have students engage in a mini-debate about whether young love is good or bad (have all of those for young love on one side and those against it on the other side and encourage them to use the supporting details they wrote on their concept maps to help make their arguments more persuasive)

Evaluation:


Activity to Avoid Wasting Time
Doppelgängers and “Googlegängers” (I got this idea from Professor Ostenson)
· Write the word “doppelgänger” on the board and ask if anyone in the class speaks German or knows what the word means
o Explain that doppelgänger is a German word for someone’s double or look-alike
Doppel = double, Gänger = goer – Thus a “double goer”
o Ask students if they have any doppelgängers of themselves that they’ve seen or heard about from others
Fun discussion will ensue!
· Now put up the word “googlegänger” and have students guess what it means based on what doppelgänger means
o “Googlegänger” means a google goer, or someone’s double on google
o Ask students if they’ve “googled” themselves and what they’ve found
o Quickly discuss people’s google doubles and your own google double if you have one
Fun discussion will ensue!
· Shows students how fun language and word meanings can be!

I also have three artifacts I made that I'll bring to class.