Graphic organizers are various types of concept mapping. Their purpose is to provide students with an organized way of taking notes and making connections in the classroom. When the instructor has planned out the lesson, they have an idea of the key topics that they want students to retain as well as the connections that they expect students to make during the day. By creating a graphic organizer, the instructor communicates guided expectations to the student. By doing so, the student can now engage in the lecture because they feel confident they are successfully connecting to the content in the way the instructor intended for them to do so. 

During the planning of the lesson, you will use the lesson objectives to pick out key concepts or ideas of the day. You will then create a graphic template for students to fill out as they are listening to the lecture. These do not need to be graded and can be used by students to reference back to later in the course. 

At the beginning of the lecture, you will provide students with a copy of the graphic organizer. For the first time using a graphic organizer in the classroom, you will need to instruct or model what you would like them to do with this graphic organizer during the lecture. This will enhance student engagement because they will have a guide to what they need to focus on during the lecture. 

In a remote classroom, the same procedure will apply. You can share the graphic organizer through Google Documents or PDF and have the students fill it out using the KAMI Google chrome extension.