Try out LessonUp’s new, improved Mind Map 🤩
Thomas Courtley
Education Specialist
The perfect, interactive way of gathering information
 Many teachers use mind maps to activate students' prior knowledge. By categorising (and especially giving feedback on) prior knowledge, new learning material is digested better. Our cognitive load is limited, so if we don’t review previously anchored memories, remembering old information will hinder us from acquiring new information and making it stick. Starting a lesson with a mind map is a great way of making space for new information, and of building on the foundation of what students already know.
Implementing a mind map on a whiteboard or digital screen is also the perfect, interactive way of gathering information in one central place. Mind maps connect the class’ collective prior knowledge about a central topic, creating a class information web. It’s the ideal starting point for interesting student conversations and discussions.Â
Advantages of teaching with a digital mind map
The LessonUp mind map is a particularly loved interactive component.Â
Although the idea of a mind map is almost as old as education, the digital version in LessonUp offers a number of advantages. For example, you can choose to keep responses anonymous, or visible to the class by clicking on each answer once. In that case the student's name will appear next to his/her answer. You can also delete inappropriate responses by dragging them directly to the trash bin if needed.Â
Until now, student feedback could be accessed only when the lesson was finished, in the report. If you moved on to the next slide, you could not go back to the latest information written by your students in the mind map. That has changed now.
With the new mind map the didactic circle is complete
The LessonUp mind map is now even more interesting from a didactic perspective.
Until recently, the mind map categorisations went lost when moving on to the next slide of a lesson. To check them, you had to go to the lesson report. Now the latest student feedback is saved within the mind map. It is always there for consultation. You can check it at any moment by going back to the mind map slide, or via the test results.
The mind map is normally implemented at the beginning of a lesson, to activate prior knowledge. Yet at a later stage of a lesson, while teaching new material, you might feel the need to take a step back and run through what your students knew at the beginning. It is interesting to see how new information relates to prior knowledge.
Now everything is connected. You and your students can move from prior knowledge to future knowledge and back, within the present lesson.Â
