A debate between the pros and cons of in-class and online education systems has been discussed and argued during the recent years. This COVID-19 pandemic, unfortunately, puts the classroom experience on hiatus and leaves billions of students and teachers transitioning into and experimenting with higher technology – online classrooms. Though gradually becoming popular during previous years, online teaching suddenly becomes the only option left for everyone starting the year of 2020. In this following article, I will be talking about essential guidelines for teachers who are still adapting to the online setting and providing some helpful ways to possibly achieve better academic experience when incorporating XMind into online teaching.

Essential Principles

Many essential principles of online teaching are more like common-sense, but they are important for one to know and follow when conducting online classes. For example, according to the article How to Be a Better Online Teacher by Flower Darby, some principles include that an online teacher needs to organize the course content more intuitively, add more visual contents, etc. If interested, here is the fully summarized XMind map: http://www.xmind.net/m/JeyT3i.

With XMind

A powerful mind mapping tool can be a huge help toward online teaching in many ways.

Presentation

Teachers of both traditional and online classrooms tend to include tons of written texts in their prepared materials, which turns out to be dry and unappealing to most students.

Adding a variety of visual contents to your presentation, such as inserting photos or including relevant videos, is more entertaining and pleasing for students to study with. Among those visual options, mind map graphed with XMind is a more interesting way of presenting texts along with photos & web links. XMind also offers transparent background when exporting, so it is easy and convenient for teachers to insert the graph into any presentation format. Below is an example used in an Economics online class.

Live Note-taking

If a teacher is conducting a live class while sharing the computer screen with students, mind mapping with XMind can be an efficient lecturing method. A live streaming lecture with mind mapping on the screen and synchronous audio explanation is easier for online students to follow the logic flow of academic concepts. XMind 2020 also supports equation insertion with the LaTeX command which is greatly suitable for science-related subject lectures.

Grading

When a teacher posts an assignment online, some students may find that the online instructions confused and unclear. It takes a longer time for online students to get clarified via emailing instead of asking in-person. In this case, a clear and well-organized rubric should be provided to students in advance, which informs some general grading criteria and other specific things you are looking for. An electronic copy of individual grading feedback afterward is also helpful for students to analyze their submitted work and understand where they could improve upon the next time.

Student Assignment

Frequent paperwork assignments can be burdensome and tiring for many students as the standard essay format may limit creativity to some extent. Therefore, it is probably more beneficial to leave an assignment that is allowed to be conducted in different formats.

Mind map, recognized as one of the best tools to organize thoughts and inspire creativity, enables students to unleash thinking for both individual and group projects, whenever they are writing an essay outline, preparing a group presentation or summarizing reading notes.

Hope everyone is getting the most out of their online teaching and learning experiences! We believe that the addition of XMind will bring higher efficiency and more entertaining content to the online classroom. XMind does have a special discounted offer for students & educators at educational institutions, so please check out if interested! Thanks for your time reading.