OTAN News

The Power of Graphic Organizers

ImageK by Biljana Jovanovic from Pixabay

As educators, we are always looking for ways that students can make better sense of the information we provide them in our lessons. Note-taking is one way of doing this, but we have a lot of other tools at our disposal that students can use (and we can use to organize our lessons).

We are probably familiar with graphic organizers and may have even used a few of them from time to time, but now with technology behind them, we and our students can use graphic organizers regularly in class to organize content and see and show the relationships between the pieces of information they are learning. Now is a great time to re-familiarize ourselves with graphic organizers and think about how to integrate these into our instruction.

According to many authors, there are numerous benefits to using graphic organizers, including:

• Combinations of text and graphics better support the material you teach students rather than using PowerPoint slides and/or handouts that are all or mostly text.

• They are useful to help students organize their thoughts and get ready for reading and writing in the pre-reading and pre-writing stages.

• Students should generate their own graphic organizers, instead of adding pictures or graphics they find elsewhere, that complement the writing they have just completed, further demonstrating their learning.

• All kinds of graphic organizers can be used for assessment, in addition to taking quizzes or tests.

• Graphic organizers can be used at the start of units or modules to show how all of the things students will subsequently learn, read, and do go together.

For more information on the why and how of graphic organizers, take a look at these articles:

• The Great and Powerful Graphic Organizer by Jennifer Gonzalez at Cult of Pedagogy

• Increasing the Value of Graphic Organizers by Mark Wise and Carl Cooper at Edutopia

• What Is a Graphic Organizer? By Pemala Pfeiffer at Edraw

• A Study in Visuals: Types of Graphic Organizers for Education at Lucidchart

• The Ultimate List of Graphic Organizers for Teachers and Students at Creately

We have a lot of tech tools available for teachers and students to create graphic organizers. In his article Top 15 Graphic Organizers, David Kapuler lists popular tools to help us get started, including bubbl.us, MindMeister, Stormboard, and Venngage. One helpful feature for teachers is that many of these programs have ready-to-use templates for getting started, so we don’t have to spend time starting from scratch.

Graphic organizers are powerful tools we all can use to get and stay organized. Start exploring graphic organizers today!