Empowering NYS Educators: Helping Students Organize Their Thoughts and Become Better Writers

This session will dive into an evidence-based practice for building writing skills - mind mapping. This technique involved brainstorming, organizing ideas, creating outlines and writing to produce well-structured documents. It can be used with any age learner and is ideal for independent use by students in upper elementary school through college. A great practice for students who learn differently, or who have English as a second language. This interactive presentation will prepare participants to integrate mind mapping into their daily lessons for all subject areas. We will embrace NYS CS & DF standards as a launching pad for a collaborative "mind map", where we will brainstorm ideas and resources to help educators embrace these new standards within the curriculum.

Join Tom Whitby, Liz Kaplan, and Joyce Whitby of Ideamapper, as we discuss and learn about the following topics:

• Concept of mind mapping as an evidence-based approach for building writing fluency in all subjects
• Practice of mind mapping, including: brainstorming, organizing thoughts, re-organizing thoughts, outlining, and writing a finished well-structured document
• Integration of mind mapping to support new initiatives like the New York State Computer Science and Digital Fluency (NYS CS/DF) Learning Standards

Tom is the author of The Relevant Educator: How Connectedness Empowers Learning, and The Educator's Guide to Creating Connections. Her retired from public education after serving 34 years as a secondary English teacher and an additional six years as an adjunct Professor at St Joseph’s College in New York.  He is sometimes better known as @tomwhitby on Twitter with 82,000+ followers, because of his role as co-founder of #Edchat, an award-winning education discussion group on Twitter. He is an education Blogger, My Island View and hosts the weekly #Edchat Radio Show on the BAM Radio Network. For more information see https://innovations4education.com/about-tom

Liz Oneto Kaplan

Liz began her career as an educator, teaching Spanish in rural Virginia. For over three decades she has partnered with hundreds of schools and districts as a hands-on, consultative educational sales professional. Now a senior consultant for Ideamapper, she is your New York State main point of contact. You can reach out to Liz to learn more about Ideamapper and to discuss a trial for your students.

Joyce Whitby

Joyce is a lifelong EdTechKnowledgist who started off as a special ed educator in NYC, and then taught graduate level EdTech courses at Long Island University for ten years. Since then, Joyce has been in the business of educational technology and has held leadership roles in sales leadership, professional development, and marketing with key educational technology solution providers. Currently Joyce works with her husband @tomwhitby to support emerging and growing instructional solution providers reach and impact students and teachers. For more information see https://www.ideamapper.com/joyce-whitby/

Audience:  Tech Directors, Principals, Teachers, Directors of Curriculum & Instruction

Upon registration, you will then receive a Zoom meeting invite to connect to the webinar prior to the event.  The session will be recorded and available for review for all registered attendees.

If you have any questions about the webinar, please email Sean McDonough at [email protected]