Technology Tuesdays: Graphic Organizers

Tuesday, December 18, 2012 / 5 Tevet
The Technology: Graphic Organizers

In last week's Technology Tuesdays, we looked at Exploratree, a web tool you can use to create a variety of graphic organizers, also called thinking guides or concept maps. Graphic organizers help your students map their ideas, problem solve, and analyze their thinking on almost any topic. Holt Interactive Graphic Organizers offers another, simpler way for you to create graphic organizers online. Simply download a graphic organizer template as a PDF file, enter your own text to personalize the graphic organizer for your needs, and then save or print the resulting PDF. Although you can easily adapt the text to meet your needs, the underlying graphic cannot be changed.

In Your Classroom
Each Holt graphic organizer comes with lessons and tips on how to use the particular graphic organizer in your classroom. For example, the "spider map" graphic organizer (download the pdf here) comes with teaching notes with step-by-step strategies to use the graphic organizer to identify main ideas and important details in both reading and writing lessons. All graphic organizers are downloadable here and teaching notes are available here. Once you have personalized and saved your Holt graphic organizer, you can post the PDF file in your Online Learning Center classroom or print it out to distribute in class.

In Your Curriculum
The Living Jewish Values book series includes many color-coded graphic organizers that help your students understand key information about the Jewish values explored in the series. You can use Exploratree and/or Holt Interactive Graphic Organizers to bring these marvelous brainstorming, thought organizing, and visualization tools to your other classes, too.

Dear Technology Tuesdays readers,

Join Behrman House this Thursday for a webinar that will help you make the most of Behrman House's Online Learning Center.

Jewish Studies in the Online Learning Center
Thursday, December 20 at 1:00 pm EST

Learn to use our latest Jewish Studies software to create classes in Jewish values and Jewish identity. You’ll find out how to use the videos, music, cartoons, and other multimedia features embedded into online versions of our print books so that students can move seamlessly from print to digital. Features lessons from our two newest series, Living Jewish Values and Building Jewish Identity.