Upcoming Sessions

February 10 "Always Somebody Else's Horizon"
The Horizon Report, the annual guide to technology trends, comes out in January. Find out what's ahead in one year, in two to three years, and in four to five. What are the critical challenges? How will we respond?

March 17 E-Portfolios--"Ere their Story Die"
A portfolio has been described as a "collection of a student's work specifically selected to tell a particular story." Do your students have the technological tools to create portfolios for the 21st century? Discover what some of your colleagues are doing to meet this challenge.

April 21 The Adventure of the Five Tees
Find out what famed educator Rebecca Hopkins is up to with the 5T grant. What can the rest of us learn from her experiences using technology in the classroom?

January Session: "Oh the Mind, Mind has Mountains"

The January session featured demonstrations of mind mapping software. According to Wikipedia, "mind maps are diagrams used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to or arranged around a central key word or idea." Joe Dulak, Academic Skills Center Director, talked about how he is using Cmap Tools to work with his students. This free program "empowers users to construct, navigate, share, and criticize knowledge models represented as concept maps. " You can download the program here.

Dr. Tricia Klosky, Associate Professor of Social Science and Coordinator of Criminal Justice, very successfully uses FreeMind with her students to help them map the process and progress of their research. She has seen remarkable improvements in student performance since introducing this tool.

Some other mind mapping tools include: Thinkmap's Visual Thesaurus, Google's Mind Map, and EBSCO's Visual Search (you can choose this in any of the EBSCO databases).

Watch a YouTube video with Tony Buzan, a leading figure in the mind mapping field, for more background.

This month's door prize was awarded to Dr. Patrick Barlow, Director of College Assessment, for correctly identifying the source of this session's title as coming from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Missed the session? View it now on Tegrity

January's Program: "Oh the Mind, Mind Has Mountains"

Mark your calendar for the next Chat Chow session. Wednesday, January 20th at 12:30 famed educators, Joe Dulak and Tricia Klosky, will be on hand to demonstrate how they are using mind mapping techniques. Remember there is a prize for the first person who correctly identifies the allusion in this month's title (hint--think poet).