Mind Maps With Lucid

Hello, and welcome to this Tech-Integrated Strategy. Whether you’re teaching online or in a face-to-face setting, learning in the modern classroom often benefits from the digital mediation of educational activities. In this resource, we’re going to talk about how to use the Mind Maps instructional strategy with the Lucid tech tool. Mind Maps is a strategy that helps students create visual representations of their learning in non-linear ways. Beginning with a main idea in the center, students add pictures, words, and symbols and connect them with lines and arrows to demonstrate how the ideas are related. Lucid is an online suite of visual collaboration tools that enables students to digitally diagram their thinking, which makes this tech tool an excellent fit for facilitating the Mind Maps strategy. In the next video, we’ll go through step-by-step instructions for how to set up and use Lucid to facilitate the Mind Maps strategy.

1. First, open Lucid and click “Log in.”

2. Log in with your Google, Office 365, or Slack account.

3. In the top-left corner of your screen, click “+ New.”

4. Select “Lucidchart.”

5. Select “Blank Document.” 

   (If you are a new user, you will initially see a button that says, “Start diagramming.” Once you've created your first Lucidchart, your screen will look like this the next time you go to create a new document.)

6. In the top-left corner of your screen, type a new title for your blank diagram.

7. To add a text box, click on the T icon in the left-hand panel. Click and drag the T to the grid paper on the right.

8. Double-click to highlight the text in your text box. Type the main idea of the content.

9. In the bottom-left corner of the document, click on the dropdown caret to the right of “Page 1.”

10. Select “Duplicate.”

11. Type a student’s name.

    Continue duplicating the Mind Map until you have created one for each student.

12. In the top-right corner of your screen, click “Share.”

13. Select “Join ID.”

14. Using the toggle switch on the right, turn on the option to “Share a Join ID for easy access.”

15. Select “Copy invitation” to add the link and Join ID to your clipboard.

    To share with the class, paste the link and Join ID into your slide deck, LMS, or whatever platform you use to share information with students.

Before you facilitate this activity, make sure students have access to the Mind Maps you created in Lucid. Tell students they will begin the activity by finding the Lucidchart page associated with their name. Have each student navigate to their own Mind Map by selecting their name along the bottom of the screen. Share the main idea of the content or unit with students. Have students branch out from the center of the Lucidchart to add details that show their learning. These details can be in the form of pictures, words, or symbols. Students should connect related ideas with arrows and lines. They can elaborate on the connections they make with more words, pictures, or symbols. In the next video, we will discuss Use Cases to explore how Mind Maps and Lucid can be seamlessly integrated into the classroom across different content areas.

The Mind Maps strategy is best suited for the end of a lesson or unit of study to help students summarize, reflect on, or synthesize their knowledge of a topic. In a science classroom, you might have students create Mind Maps to wrap up a unit on natural selection. You could ask students to show how their lab data analysis, reading notes, and video reflections help them better understand how natural selection contributes to the expansion of some species and the decline of others. In English language arts, you could ask students to provide details that support the main idea of a text. In a government class, you could have students use Mind Maps to show how power is shared in a federal system. Ultimately, Mind Maps and Lucid can be used with just about any content area. Due to the complexity of this activity, it is ideally suited for upper elementary and higher grade levels.