ExamTime Presents a Mind Map About Creating Mind Maps

ExamTime is a service that students can use to create flashcards, mind maps, and practice quizzes to help them study. After I published my chart of free mind mapping tools, the folks at ExamTime shared with me a mind map about creating mind maps. ExamTime's mind map on mind maps outlines ideas and best practices for developing mind maps. That mind map is embedded below.
Mind Map created by PatrickNoonan with ExamTime

As mentioned above, ExamTime offers a free tool for creating mind maps. Their mind map tool supports the use of text and images. The video embedded below provides an overview of how to use ExamTime's mind mapping tools.



Applications for Education
Creating mind maps or webs is one of my favorite ways to organize ideas and information. I've often had my students create mind maps as an exercise in making visual connections between important concepts, events, and people in a unit of study.

How to Enable Collaboration on Thinglink Interactive Images

Last week I received an email from a reader who was looking for a way to have her students collaborate on a multimedia collage. My immediate suggestion was to try Thinglink. She wasn't aware that Thinglink allows students to collaborate on the creation of interactive images. I made a short video to help her and others who haven't tried Thinglink's collaboration option. The video is embedded below.



Check out this post for more ideas on using Thinglink to create multimedia collages.

50 Interactive Activities to Embed Into Elementary School Blogs

Gynzy is a service that offers pre-made activities for interactive whiteboards and websites. Much of their content is only available through a subscription, but they do offer a collection of 50 free activities that anyone can access. The free activities are appropriate as supplements to elementary school math, science, social studies, and language arts lessons. Each of the 50 free activities can be used on the Gynzy site or embedded into your classroom blog or website. One of the activities from the math section of Gynzy is embedded below.


Applications for Education
As mentioned above, these activities on their own are not enough to create a lesson plan. They could be good supplementary material to add to your classroom blog for students to use at home with their parents.

The Stanford University Spatial History Project - a new view of history

This is a guest post from Jennifer Carey (@TeacherJenCarey) of EdTechTeacher - an advertiser on this site.

Stanford University’s Spatial History Project is a community that combines humanities research with “spatial, textual and visual analysis.” On their about page, they explain that as scholars, they realize the significance and importance of displaying information within a spatial context. Too often, history is presented chronologically but a visual can provide learners with valuable context to help them make connections to a broader context.

The Spatial History Project is an amazing collection of interactive maps that explore ancient and modern societies, cultural practices, expansion, environmental impact, and more. Students could delve into topics in the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative, view changing population densities in America from 1790-2000, or explore the history of Chinese American Railroad Workers as shown below.

Chinese Railroad Workers Project Introduction Video from Chinese Railroad Workers on Vimeo.

The site is an excellent repository of robust, interactive tools for students to explore various themes in the humanities. This is an active project, so be sure to check in often.

For more ideas about incorporating technology into History and Social Studies curricula, visit the Center for Teaching History with Technology as well as Best of History Web Sites.