CMAP

CMAP is a concept map application that I used for one of my classes this spring. Rather than an online tool, CMAP is something you have to download to your computer. Since this is a computer program, it means the end results are only saved to the local computer. At our school, our students have their own personal drive on the school network, which means they can access it on any computer attached to the school's network. Our school is also moving toward a one-to-one program, so each student would have their own computer to save it to anyway.

When you open CMAP, you are brought to this screen. It shows you the CMAPs you have made and you can choose to open one. Otherwise you can click on File and choose  New CMAP to start a new one. 

Once you have a new CMAP up, you can click anywhere to put a concept. A little box appears with a text box to type in. You have the ability to change the color of the text box, the size of the font, and the font. 

The Styles window contains all the customization options available to the user and stays open as long as you are in the CMAP application. 

At the top of each text box is a smaller box with arrows. Clicking on that generates an arrow you can drag to where ever you want to place the related concept. When you stop dragging, a new text box appears as well as the smaller text on the arrow where you can explain the relationship between the two concepts. For the relationship, you generally want to keep the descriptor short and to the point. My professor explained that if the relationship was too long, I probably needed to create a new concept.

This is a CMAP I created for a class assignment detailing the different types and styles of Co-teaching. As you can see, I tried to make co-teaching a more obvious text box so it would be immediately apparent that my concept map is about co-teaching. A concept map can quickly become a concept web, with arrows heading in all different directions. As you create your web, you may find that you need to move things around. CMAP makes that easy to do--you can highlight whole sections (with a mouse click and drag) and move them all together or you can click on an individual concept and click and drag it where ever you want. 

To further delinieate relationships, I used color coding. For each sub category of co-teaching, I made the font a little larger than the normal 12 and then spidered off that with smaller sub-concepts that would describe or explain the concept. This way, it is easy to visually see what text boxes belong to which concept.

I really enjoyed creating concept maps with CMAP. It helped me think more deeply about the various relationships between concepts and challenged me to draw comparisons and visualize these concepts in a different way. 

I think CMAPs could be incredibly useful brainstorming application for school librarians. Individual students or student teams could take a particular aspect of a topic being studied and create a concept map for it that highlights most of the major issues connected to the topic. The class could then come together and see how the various concept maps could be connected in a giant concept web for the main, overarching topic. 

It could also be used to help students think about a topic. Research came to my mind. Students could be tasked with creating a concept map for research, being sure to include the steps of the research process and determine what sub-concepts would be relevant to each step.