I absolutely love Popplet! My students and I will be using it on a weekly basis to create anchor charts, organize thoughts, assess understanding or help students create connections of concepts.

What is Popplet? (directly from their website) "In the classroom and at home, students use Popplet for learning. Used as a mind-map, Popplet helps students think and learn visually. Students can capture facts, thoughts, and images and learn to create relationships between them."

What I did for a Tech Infused Lesson:

While discussing force with my 5th graders I wanted to them to organize their thoughts during the week, in order to Tech Up my lesson decided that my students were going to use Popplet to be the medium through which students would organize and developed their thoughts.

Since it was my first time using Popplet as a class I didn't want to purchase the Group Subscription because I wasn't sure how it was all going to work out. What I ended up doing was creating 11 (you read correctly... 11!!) different Gmail school accounts and Popplet accounts so that each student could save their work. If you remember from above... I would highly recommending looking into Popplet Groups.

I checked out the netbook cart from our Media Center for the week since this was going to be an ongoing lesson. I walked students through signing on (after the first 2 days they got the hang of it!). On Monday I started my lesson by explaining what force is and the students independently watched a Brain Pop Jr. video about force. Then we went through together and listed the 5 kinds of force that we were going to discuss for the week (magnetism, push, pull, gravity, friction). Each day we focused on a specific kind of force and added definitions, examples and pictures (from Flickr) to our Popplets. On Friday I took the students to the computer lab and we printed our Popplets and they glued them in their science journals.

Student Samples:

Lesson Reflection:

I thought the lesson went pretty smoothly and students really enjoyed creating their Popplets. I wish I would have had students collaborate on Popplets so that they didn't take as much time to create and then they could have taught each other from their one Popplet. Many students gave examples that truly showed that they applied their academic vocabulary and understood the content. I did not think ahead of time about modifying the assignment for specific students but on the spot I was able to tell them my expectations (Ex: I had a special education student that provided only pictures for examples). In the future I would also like to provide students with a rubric and have them proof read each others work.

A few random notes:

1. For the iPads/iPods: Popplet Lite App is what you have to use due to flash... it works well but I personally prefer the website

2. I would highly recommend looking into Popplet Groups

3. Sometimes the pictures from Flickr can be inappropriate, ahead of time be sure you have discussed digital citizenship and what to do if you happen to be presented with inappropriate content

Do you know of any other mind map apps that are K-5th grade friendly?