Creaza

Another great Web 2 tool for the classroom is Creaza. This site has several different parts to it requiring one login.

Mindomo: With this tool you can make mindmaps for visual learning, developing creativity and problem solving. You can organise and present your ideas visually.

Cartoonist: with this tool you can create your own cartoons. You can use their professional backgrounds, characters, props, images and text. You can also create title cards, speech balloons, thought balloons, or scream balloons. You can also combine all this with your own images.

MovieEditor: MovieEditor is an online video editor to create movies, complete with professional-looking titles, transitions, effects, animation, music, and narration. It is a timeline-based video editor, similar to traditional desktop-based video editing tools. The difference - MovieEditor is web-based and a web browser with Adobe Flash gives you instant access! You can export the result to your favourite media player, or directly to YouTube or Facebook.

AudioEditor: AudioEditor is an online audio editor for recording, slicing, and mixing audio. It is useful if you want to publish the finished sound clip as a podcast.

This tool follows established conventions for sound editing, allowing you to place sound files along a timeline, across several channels.

You can also record sound and add it as a track on top of your final edit.

Mindmaps and critical thinking

I have just been reading:

Twardy, C. R., (2004). Argument Maps Improve Critical Thinking Teaching Philosophy, 27:2

This is very interesting although is discussing a particular piece of software to create argument maps his main thrust can be applied to other software that does similar things. At first he was sceptical about whether the use of argument maps indeed improved critical thinking skills but...

He found that students needed practice and that the three major components are argument mapping, quality practice, and scaffolded, structured learning.

"Practice is clearly important: argument mapping without practice would not much improve critical thinking. Likewise, clear structure and expectations will improve any subject. Nevertheless, I suspect that argument mapping is the key — that if a traditional critical-thinking class matched the amount of practice and graduated structure of the Reason!(software package) method, it would not show the same level of improvement." (p.13)

I suspect that many teachers using mindmapping software do not use it as fully as it is intended but just as a quick brainstorm. Many of these packages have templates to help teachers to use them to encourage higher order thinking skills.