When I was a teacher in schools in Singapore, I always make a point to teach my students to learn how take notes. I would usually teach them how to create Mind Maps. This is my favorite way of taking notes and is the way that Tony Buzan advocates. I like it because it gives me great flexibility to arrange my notes in a structure that makes sense to me. It’s arrangement reflects the way I think of the subject.

The Mind Map is a very effective graphic organizer. Graphic organizers are diagrams that represent the relationships of ideas through the use of abstract symbols and words. Graphic organizers in fact can be used to help us frame our thinking and many different graphic organizers have been designed for the specific kinds of thinking that we want to do. The graphic organizer to help someone do a comparison is different from a graphic organizer that helps someone to show how to make a proposition with reasoned arguments.

Graphic organizers help teachers and students be focused on important information. It helps students and teachers to sieve through a lot of information at a glance. Graphic organizers also helps to arrange information in a coherent manner so students and teachers can see the relationships between concepts and elements. Too often students get bits of information from their books and teachers but if they cannot make sense of the information, then it remains only as disparate bits of information and not knowledge. Knowledge is attained only when students make sense of the information. Graphic organizers help students to make knowledge out of information by allowing them to see the relationships between concepts and elements.

Teachers must make greater effort to use graphic organizers in their classrooms. They must also teach their students to choose the correct graphic organizer for each of the thinking skills that the student is going to employ. Graphic organizers help make our students knowledgeable.