Thing 14

I want to start off by saying that I love brainstorming activities.  LOVE!  As a student, I would get excited when the teacher would stand by the chalkboard and draw the ever recognizable circle on the chalkboard (yep, the old school chalkboard) with a theme written in the center.  And as a class, we would all try to come up with ideas that branched off that theme.  I would literally be bouncing in my seat with my hand straight up in the air desperately hoping the teacher would add my idea to the brainstorming bubble.

With that being said, I was immediately drawn to bubbl.us.  Granted, this might be a bit more high tech than my favorite chalkboard brainstorming activity, but in the end, it's the same concept.  I really like how bubbl.us allows you to organize your thoughts around a central idea and color code main ideas within this overall theme.  This helps to give a quick visual outline of a broad idea, the main themes within that idea, and then the smaller concepts within those main themes.  The inner child in me could not wait to try this out!  However, I decided not to go for a theme such as "creative ways to use a soup can" (an actual brainstorming activity I remember doing in grade school), but instead chose to use the mind map in a more productive way to outline some of the major themes that I have for an upcoming paper.  In five minutes, I had a pretty good outline of some of the key components of bilingual education. 

After playing around on bubble.us, I had to drag myself away to try a flow chart.  I chose to look at Gliffy simply because I didn't want to wait for flowchart.com to send me an invitation :)  I enjoyed looking around at the site for a bit and getting a few laughs at the funny flow chart examples they have.  Although  I can see flow charts being a great resource for older students, as a future K-2 teacher, I feel that the mind map is a tool that will be more useful in my future classroom.  Or, maybe it's my brainstorming bias coming out.  Either way, bubbl.us will be making it on my list of useful tools that I can use in my classroom and trick my future students into thinking I actually know a thing or two about technology!