KIE SenseMaker Tool - Philip Bell
Students Make Sense of Web-Based Evidence and Reflect on Their
Understanding Using SenseMaker
SenseMaker is a software tool developed as part of the KIE project that helps students figure out the relationships that exist between a number of different Web resources. As they investigate pieces of Internet evidence, students organize the items from the Web into categories (or frames) in Sensemaker. The SenseMaker they construct can be an argument they use as part a debate project or as an organization of different resources during a design project. SenseMaker helps students understand and use the diverse range of information found on the Web.
SAMPLE STUDENT WORK. The following is a SenseMaker argument created by middle school students for use in a classroom debate about the properties of light. Other groups in the class would have created arguments based on their understanding of the debate. By allowing students to express and share their ideas about a topic or a set of Web resources, Sensemaker helps make their thinking visible.
PUBLICATIONS.The following research paper describes some of the classroom-based formative trials of SenseMaker:
Bell, P. (1997). Using argument representations to make thinking visible for individuals and groups. In R. Hall, N. Miyake, & N. Enyedy (Eds.), Proceedings of CSCL '97: The Second International Conference on Computer Support for Collaborative Learning, (pp. 10-19). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.