5.   Building the Concept Map

Choosing title and main headings

Once you have finished the brainstorm or imported a set of words into the WordHoard, you are ready to start the mapping.  Users need to select a title from the key words in the WordHoard, e.g. Healthy Eating, and the title will appear in the middle of the Map.

The next stage is to decide upon the main chapters or headings and drag these out to the title in the middle. They will attach automatically and users can curve the lines and position them where they want to.  

Making connections

Teachers or learners who have selected the title and created the main ‘chapters’ or branches now need to begin to build the Concept Map by adding further ‘branches’ and then ‘twigs’. The key idea for users to bear in mind as they do this is that extensions to a branch should have some kind of logical/conceptual connection to the main branch, which makes this process good for thinking skills.

So, in Tutorial 5 you will see that one of the main chapters or branches on the topic of Healthy Eating is Drugs. Three branches extend from this main branch – Alcohol, Caffeine and Tobacco, three types of drug found in daily consumption by many people. If you choose to extend into twigs, you might add Liver to the Alcohol branch, Coffee to the Caffeine branch and Tar and Lungs to the Tobacco branch.   You could add other related twigs to these if you wanted to extend the detail into the impact of such drugs on health.

Using words more than once

Remember that because EyeWrite adopts the idea of a WordHoard at the side of the screen, key words can be used more than once. For example, in a topic in Healthy Eating the word Carbohydrate might be used as a branch or twig for the section on Balanced diet, but it might also appear as a branch for the section on Exercise.

Tutorial 5 Building the Concept Map

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