Graphic organizers help students through use of relationships. The visual learner organize and process the information taught. From this technique hopefully students will be able to take prior knowledge and recognize relationships within the material to be learned.
Zena,
Right you are about what learners want. The more we can give them this information in a graphic way the more they will learn in each class session. This will also impact their retention of the content for use later on.
Gary
Gary Meers, Ed.D.
info graphics are a reality. people want bite size info given to them /immediate/directly and hopefully we can help students to develop the research and be social citizens/ responsible for the information they put forth
Laura,
Well done! This is how teaching should be done because you are showing the students that they can accomplish the end task if they will listen, observe and sequence what they need to do. Reminds me of the age old question --How do you eat an elephant? Answer: One bite at a time. This is how learning works best. Someone once said that learning is a lot like taking drink out of a fire hose and I believe it. This approach slows it down in manageable way for the students.
Gary
Gary Meers, Ed.D.
Samuel,
Good analysis of how graphic organizers contribute to the learning process. They help students to see how the parts become the whole when fitted together in a learning sequence.
Gary
Gary Meers, Ed.D.
In the age of fast-food, drive up banking, and Internet shopping - we are moving a million miles per hour! This is carried over into our learning expectations, and as such, many adult learners seem to be mroe successful in leanring/retaining information via some visual help (aka graphic organizers).
I find this particularly true when teaching complex topics that are either techincal in nature or have many steps. By illustrating the relationships of such steps, or the dependencies of compoenents, students seem to understand the concepts more rapidly and with greater accuracy. I think graphic organizers provide a common visual medium whereby individual learners can decode and store accordingly for retrieval later...
Hi Gary:
In my Foundations II class we are charged with making a classic & complicated soup recipe called 'Potage DuBarry'. It requires many steps and seems daunting. I start the breakdown of the recipe by first assuring the students that they have already accompllished all but one of the required techniques for the soup, and that the new technique, a liasion, is a finishing step. Here there is a collective sigh of relief as the new step is at the end . Next, I verbally describe and visually write out the steps that are required on the board that will lead to the finished soup. This way they are seeing this recipe as not only something they can do, and that the recipe is combined of known 'pieces'....but....they are also learning strategic integration!!! They are learning that by combining different techniques in the same recipe, something more complicated can be created, step-by-step.
Tom,
It worked for me. I don't believe I would have gotten many of the math concepts without graphically seeing them and building from there.
Gary
Gary Meers, Ed.D.
Students can utilize the graphic organizers for each topic they have which works well if they several different topics.
James,
Yes, they will but as you say only if the content is well organized and well presented. When it is then there is a building process that occurs with the students and their knowledge acquisition.
Gary
Gary Meers, Ed.D.
In math, graphing an equation is about prediction.
By graphing we predict what the next answers will be.
By the use of "graphing" in this context we guide to the solutions.
When the content is clearly organized, graphic organizers are terrific in helping students subsume important concepts and build schema. However, the course materials must be relevant, well organized. These devices will keep the student on track giving them cues which will increase the likelihood of students meeting course learning objectives.
Terence,
They are a great help to visual learners. They also help auditory learners because they help them physically organize their materials in a visual way that makes sense to them after they have heard a lecture on the content.
Gary
Gary Meers, Ed.D.
Shannon,
Thank you for sharing how graphic organizers can benefit students in your field. I know this information will be helpful to other instructors in the health field. There is so much to learn and the more supports that students can use the higher their retention of the content is going to be.
Gary
Gary Meers, Ed.D.
It appeals to visual learners and helps them to focus and remember what they are doing.
I think the use of graphic organizers vary depending on the type of learner students are. For example, I teach a Medical Terminology class and we emphasize word parts and their meanings. Sometimes I use diagrams of the body pertaining to which chapter we are working on to show the students how each word part, particularly combining forms, play an important role in understanding the terminology. I think graphic organizers are an excellent aid to help students gain the extra edge to learning important material in each course to be successful.
Tonya,
This is one of the fun parts of teaching. Teaching is in many situations discovery learning for you as you try new things and find out what strategies will work.
Gary
Gary Meers, Ed.D.
Tonya,
True. This is why it is important to customize your instruction to meet their needs in this way.
Gary
Gary Meers, Ed.D.
Tonya,
Right you are. They can see the outcome of what they are working on through the use of devices like this.
Gary
Gary Meers, Ed.D.
I agree and sometimes you use this strategy and don't even realize your using it.
