Graphic Organizers..Chapter 6

I think that graphic organizers are a great tool for students to use in the classroom. They allow the students to get a visual representation and help organize their thoughts. I remember using charts, web maps and other graphic organizers in school and it always allowed me to really remember the information being shown. I'm a visual learner and can remember things much easier if I can see them laid out and organized. Concept maps and venn diagrams were always the easiest for me to understand. I like being able to see all of the information in front of me and being able to compare and contrast different things. We always used them a lot in groups and would then present the information to the class and share the different things we came up with. I think that this not only helped the visual learners, but also the auditory learners as well.
I feel that this is a great way for the visual learners to express themselves. Not all students can tell you orally about a certain topic. Some find it much easier to use a graphic organizer of some kind to show the information they gained. I felt this way in school and often couldn't express myself about certain topics. We were sometimes forced to do oral presentations without visuals, and I always did terrible. I could never get the point across like I was supposed to and knew that a simple visual would help. Anytime we were allowed to use a visual aid, I had a much easier time sharing what I learned. I'm a very creative person and love the chance to be able to show my creativity and how my brain comprehends things. I think that graphic organizers are perfect for students like myself. It gives them the chance to show the teacher what they can do and show that they actually learned the content.
I also feel like they benefit students who are good at expressing themselves through writing (papers). The graphic organizers will organize their ideas and help them to choose their main points and topics. I think that this will help them to build their own ideas to include in their writing and help them to include every bit of information into their paper. As I mentioned earlier, I think that sharing the different parts of information to the class in groups allows the students to feed off of each others ideas. This will open up each students' thinking and they will build their own ideas from what was gained. Doing the graphic organizers before reading or before learning certain content never really appealed to me as much as doing it after. I just found that I never really paid close enough attention until after the content was actually presented to me. (if that makes sense) :)  I used them to show all the knowledge I knew/gained about a certain topic after it had been discussed. It allowed me to throw out anything I knew about a topic and put it into some type of organization on paper so that it could be organized in my brain.
A question that I had while reading was:
Because I never had interest in using the graphic organizers before reading/learning new material, How can I correctly use them to help my students gain knowledge before reading/teaching? How can I show them that this is a helpful prereading/learning tool when I never found it helpful myself?