Digital Audio Maps: Interactive Word-Diagrams

Illustration by David Goodwin, @MrGoodwin23

How do graphic organisers support your teaching?

Since the early days of my career as an English teacher, designing learning visuals has been part of my teaching practice. I commonly use graphic organisers to scaffold writing, break down information and assist students in making connections between themes, characters and context. Literary texts present a labyrinth of challenging ideas and techniques. By organising those ideas and pairing words with graphics, information becomes more visible so that learning is clear and concrete for students.

In recent years, I have learnt the value of good instructional design. Minimising distracting and unnecessary visuals is critical to ensure the working memory is not overloaded. I encourage thinking by providing my students with simply designed frameworks and partially completed scaffolds. I create concept maps to unpack hierarchies and flow charts to explore sequences and key events in texts.

Jamie’s resource for Year 9 English - illustrations created in Affinity Designer

How has technology changed the way your students learn with graphic organisers?

Technology has empowered my students to demonstrate learning in different ways. In order to revise the relationships between characters and historical context in George Orwell’s allegorical novella ‘Animal Farm’, I created a digital ‘audio map’. This allowed Year 9 students to record verbal explanations linking characters with underlying political ideas about power and oppression in the Russian Revolution.

I designed the map using Apple’s Keynote software so that students could easily capture and insert short audio recordings within the app (Microsoft PowerPoint and the Mote application for Google Slides do a similar job). Adapting the conventional concept map approach, I replaced connecting verbs with big questions such as, ‘How does Boxer’s relationship with Napoleon change [throughout the text]?’. To establish my expectations, I recorded a short example to model the type of vocabulary and form of expression required for success.

This multi-modal graphic organiser worked well as a retrieval exercise, as students used their devices to narrate their understanding from memory without any supporting notes or teacher input. Afterwards, students listened to and checked their responses against their knowledge organisers and workbooks to identify crucial gaps in understanding. Any misconceptions were addressed and re-recorded onto the map.

Digital audio recordings allowed students to provide more elaborative responses and gave me a deeper insight into their understanding. Keeping the focus on pedagogy is a key message when I coach teachers as technology can sometimes be gimmicky if not utilised in a meaningful way. As a result, I created several more audio maps for other key texts in the curriculum.

How has educational research influenced your use of graphic organisers?

Understanding Cognitive Load Theory has allowed me to take into account the cognitive architecture of human memory. I challenged myself to reduce extraneous load and increase intrinsic load within all my learning materials. My graphic organisers chunk and arrange information into containers and paths that show clear relationships. I decrease the volume of words, simplify visual representations and streamline my colour palettes to achieve visual clarity and create powerful learning experiences for students.

Affinity Designer (iPad)

Whilst I use Keynote to create my resources, I realised Affinity Designer on the iPad was a useful app for high-quality illustration. Check out my first attempts!

Organise Ideas: Thinking by Hand, Extending the Mind

Recently, I have had the honour of contributing to Oliver Caviglioli and David Goodwin’s book ‘Graphic Organisers: Thinking by Hand, Extending the Mind’. The experience opened my eyes to ways in which graphic organisers — or more specifically, word-diagrams — can help students capture transient information and support learning. This book has inspired my recent work on audio maps - you can purchase Oliver and David’s book on Amazon now. I highly recommend it!