If you’ve been following the Sociology and Psychology Roadmap series over the past few days you’ll be aware we published a few blank PowerPoint templates (and by “a few” I mean “three”) that enable you to make your own Roadmaps.
Given these were probably not the most user-friendly resources for anyone eager to make their own bespoke Roadmap, I decided it might be more helpful to create a template that might be better-suited to producing something similar to – or preferably an improvement on – the kind of pre-made Roadmaps we’ve previously published.
Or, as it turned out, a number of templates.
You know how it is, you make one template then think about how to improve it and before you know it you’ve lost track of how many of the damn things you’ve made.
To this end, therefore, if you’ve been inspired by the Roadmaps we’ve published and are looking to take your students on their very own personal Learning Journey, but lack the wherewithall to begin, I’ve created a basic Roadmap template (it is literally a map of a road) you can edit to your heart’s content.
The easiest and most flexible way to make these Maps editable is to publish them as PowerPoint Presentations. It’s a program most teachers have access to and is relatively easy to use. So that’s why the templates are all PP Presentations. Once you’ve designed your Roadmap you can also publish it as a pdf file if that’s your preferred form of distribution.
All of the templates I’ve created come with range of pre-made icons you can add to the map. You can, of course, create your own – particularly if you want to add something like text boxes – or snaffle whatever you need from the Web. You can find just about every conceivable icon you might need with a little snooping around.
And that’s it really.
The templates come in a range of varying sophistication and blankness for your design pleasure so it’s probably just a question of downloading the examples and seeing which, if any, fit the bill:
1. A Roadmap, suitable for either Sociology or Psychology, covering a 2-year course, such as A-level or GCSE, that contains nothing but a road and a couple of buttons indicating the teaching year (10 and 11 for GCSE, 12 and 13 for A-level). You can manipulate these buttons as and how you want and this template basically gives you a blank canvas on which to paint your masterpiece unique Roadmap.
It comes in two shapes, Portrait and Landscape and each has a dark or a light background.
2. As above except that instead of providing a 2-year, whole-course, Roadmap this template focuses on a single Module (such as Research Methods). For a 4 module course such as A-level, therefore, you would need to produce 4 individual Roadmaps.
Again, you can have the template in light or dark versions.
3. A Sociology Research Methods Map that covers a single Module but, unlike its blank counterpart, it has a number of pre-made embellishments. These include a list of weeks (I’ve included 8 weeks but you can add or remove them as required), short fly-outs that describe the A-level Specification (I’ve used AQA but you can replace this text with whatever Spec. you follow) and icons for Knowledge Organisers and Personal Learning Checklists. These are basically just periodic reminders to your students to add information to both types of document. This presupposes you use these documents of course. If you don’t, simply remove or replace the icons.
As with all the templates, this is available in a light or dark version.
4. The final template is the same as the previous one, except it takes advantage of a couple of PowerPoint features that allows you to trigger certain events (such as a Note appearing on-screen when you click the Knowledge Organiser or Personal Learning Checklist icons). Students can also download copies of the Organiser and Checklist from the Internet at the click of a button.
You can, of course, add further interactive elements, icons, Notes, etc. to the basic template that, again, comes in a light or dark version.
This version is one you can distribute to individual students as a complete Presentation and update as and when required. It can also, of course, be distributed as a pdf file (although the various bells and whistles won’t work if you do that).
Again, the template comes in a light or dark version.
And finally, I think I probably speak for us all when I say I hope to never see another Learning Journey Roadmap ever again.