Making Thinking Visible
North Elementary Professional Development 2/27
Driving Question: What Does It Mean To Make Thinking Visual?
Thinking About Thinking: The Why
When Thinking is Visible in Classrooms:
- Students are in a position to be more metacognitive, to think about their thinking
- It becomes clear that school is not about memorizing content but exploring ideas
- Teachers benefit when they see students' thinking because misconceptions, prior knowledge, reasoning ability, and degrees of understanding are more likely to be uncovered
- Teachers can address challenges and extend students' thinking by starting from where they are
Thinking About Thinking: The How
As Educators, We Can:
- Use the language of thinking along with being a model of thoughtfulness for students. By doing so, we emphasize several ways of making our own thinking visible to ourselves and one another
- Put thinking at the center of learning so that student's develop their thinking dispositions deepening their understanding of the topics they study.
- Set routines for introducing and exploring, synthesizing and organizing, and digging deeper into ideas paves the way for students to think and promotes a place where thinking is valued and active.
How Can We Use the Powerful Tools We Have to Help Students Accomplish This Thinking?
Thinglink
With ThingLink, students create "touchable" images. Using a single image as a background, they can layer text, images and video from the Camera, as well as links to web-based content. Completed ThingLinks can be shared with a link, via social media, or embedded on web sites.
How to ThingLink!
Bringing Visual Thinking to Life
- Math - With using visual thinking to talk, write, and reason about concepts, students are able to shift the emphasis of their work from finding the “right” answer to a metacognitive exploration of how their problem-solving works.
- Literacy - The use of digital tools helps students visually think through, think about and think with text developing their thinking dispositions, while at the same time deepening their understanding of the topics they study.
Taino People's Point of View of Christopher Columbus
Student Evidence Examples
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Additional Resources to Explore on Your Own
Book Creator
Book Creator is the simplest way to create your own beautiful iBooks, right on the iPad. This is such a great tool to use to make thinking visible in a digital Math Notebook or with any interactive Research Project.
Hyperlapse
Hyperlapse is an amazing tool you can use to create time lapse videos. Now you can capture even the longest problem solving task or explanation in half the amount of time without missing a single step of the process it took to get there!
Popplet Lite
Popplet is a free tool that allows you to create mind mapping, story mapping and brainstorming diagrams. Students can collaboratively create together or individually. Text, images and drawings can all be added to a Popplet to help express your thinking. The ideas are endless on ways to use this app.
Student Examples
Story Problems With Felt Board & Book Creator
Fact Family 6 2 4
6+5 is 11
Equal to 10