Learning itself is a process of socialisation and acculturation through interaction with more knowledgeable others in pursuit of a learning goal, according to Cullen (2013). Compared with learning individually, it will be more effective if students learn together because it creates an active learning community, which allows learners to achieve their learning goals by exchanging their knowledge and thus build confidence and social relationship on learning.
As collaboration is a situation that two or more people learn or attempt to learn something together, the following learning tools that I'm going to introduce requires two or more students to participate. You can consider to introduce it to your students for finishing their group tasks like group discussion or group projects.
This time I'm going to introduce Conceptboard to you.
Conceptboard
Conceptboard is a tool that allows you to collect and organise your ideas by using different kinds of Mind Maps. Although the target of it is for workplace use, still, it is applicable for students for finishing tasks that requires group thinking.
Interface
In Conceptboard, you can create your own Mind Map using the tools above, for example, you can insert shapes and link them with lines or arrows, or type texts on it. If you are creative enough, you can draw your own Mind Map using Scribble and Highlight.
Template
Apart from design it yourself, you can choose one Mind Map from one of the templates. The templates are categorised into six groups, and in my point of view, "Brainstorming" will be the most suitable one for language classes as it is quite simple and user-friendly.
Other functions
Also, there are other functions available in Conceptboard, for example, you can upload texts or media files to Conceptboard to illustrate your idea. It allows you to insert widgets as well.
Share boardAfter students finished the Mind Map, they can invite others to join and edit the board by using "
Share" function. When they are working on the board with their groupmates, they can use "
Chat Box" function to do discussion and exchange ideas at the same time.
Recently, I have tried it once for my writing tasks in my class. My students reflected that it is a good tool for organising ideas in overall. The main benefit is, the templates help to save our time so we can put more focus on working out ideas instead of putting extra time on having consensus in designing Mind Maps. It also provides a lot of functions that can be found in word processing software e.g. adjusting font size and colour, alignments, which can let your remarks more explicit to others.
So will I try this tool with my students? Probably, I will try it with my senior students since they will get themselves familiar with the tool easily. (There are quite a lot of functions in Conceptboard.😅) They may find it funny as well. However, I will spend half of my class time to work on the functions first in junior students classes, as they will easily get confused and have no idea where to start if they see too much features in the tool.
Still draw Mind Maps on whiteboard? Why don't consider Conceptboard?😉
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