This morning in the AT&T Classroom Mrs. Blake introduced Popplet to the students. Popplet is a free tool that can be used to create concept maps. A concept map is a graphical diagram that provides a visual representation of the relationship between concepts. Teachers often use concept maps as a strategy to facilitate students’ critical thinking and their ability to identify and understand similarities and differences among key concepts. Today Mrs. Blake demonstrated to the students how to use Popplet on the iPads to create a concept map for analysis of character traits. Mrs. Blake demonstrated how to create the main character bubble that would be the focus of their popplet and then create “popples” (aka bubbles) to describe the specific traits of that character. Engaging students in character analysis projects helps to improve their critical reading abilities as students must key in on evidence within the story’s text in order to make inferences about the character and discover the character’s important traits.