BP4_Gliffy

When it comes to explaining complex information to students there is nothing better than graphic organizers in helping to make it clear to the student what is of most importance and how everything connects to each other. As a teacher, when I make a graphic organizer, I find it is very helpful to me personally that as I go through the process of making them the content I am working with becomes better understood. So if I am able to learn my own content to a greater extent while making a graphic organizer why not have my students take an active role in creating them so they too can learn to a deeper level. The only problem with this approach up to now was the time consuming mechanics involved in creating the organizers. Dealing with paper or whiteboard in the brainstorming stage is messy and if a mistake was made all the reorganizing was difficult. Then once the final draft was made from all the brainstorming and editing, you had to redo it so it would look presentable to others.

That is where Gliffy comes in. All the brainstorming and editing can be done online right from the start. All the elements you get from the available libraries have the neat and professional look from the start. You can move them around quite easily and any connections that were made between shapes in flow charts stay connected as you move. Everything is scalable to meet your size needs. You are able to collaborate on the files with others so that a student could be creating one on their own and the teacher could come in and make suggestions on how to improve or identify areas to work on. The best feature in completion is that it can be displayed in many different formats. You can export it to Visio, which is an expensive program for making graphic organizers, or to jpeg, xml, & png which make it easy to drop into other documents. Also you can print it to a pdf file that makes it easy to share or print.

So basically, this is a great Web 2.0 tool because of free online access for all to create organizers with ease and the ability to make changes on the fly and of course the feature to work with others in the creative process.