Mind Meister
Mind Meister is a web 2.0 tool that helps you map out your thinking. It's just like a digital graphic organizer. I was looking at the website and listened to the introduction of the program and its pretty simple to use!
First you log in like all websites these days. One thing you can do on this website is organize your thoughts into a web organizer. While watching the video on this, I was thinking this would be great for each student to do before writing. This could be like their outline, with what they want to include. Not only can you make a graphic organizer but you can add notes to a part of your organizer.
I know that everyone likes to customize everything to what they like. This webiste also allows you to do this. There are tons of themes to choose from, or you can customize it piece by piece until it's to your liking.
The new updates now allow you to drag and drop images or attachments right into a part of your organizer. Mindmeister makes this possible through the Google Docs Viewer they've incorporated. The documents/attachments are easily visible and the images can be resized to fit it's placement.
Collaboration:
You can invite people to view your organizer. All you do is add their email address, and add a note to go along with if you wish. They can then view your organizer and see all aspects of your thinking, put into a viewer that you have created! They can then add to your organizer as well.
This tool is a collaborative tool that can be used as a presentation as well. You can go back and view the history or the making of the organizer. Your able to see the progress throughout the creation, just like that webiste we used to create a story about the checks! You'd see who added what, at what point during the creation. They use a color system for each person adding to the organizer just like the other website, to make the changes easikly identifiable.
Mobile:
Can be used as an App on mobile phones, Ipads, and so on.
There is a charge per month with this program, but you can specify what plan you would want. You can do a free trial with up to 3 mind maps in your free trial!
Versions:
You can get a Personal Plan, Pro Plan, or Business Plan. The personal is just for individual use (and the cheapest per month). The Pro Plan you can do individual or it works well with teams of people, and the business plan is for 10+ people to work with.
I really like the tool, and can think of tons of ways to use it in the classroom, but I know budgets are tight. If there was a free program like this that you know of please let me know :)
http://www.mindmeister.com/
FYI I found Mindmeister through this website which lists TONS AND TONS of other apps and programs online to use for many different things. You can narrow down your selection by clicking on what you are looking for. http://www.go2web20.net/
This is a very solid mind-mapping tool. You have definitely given us a very helpful breakdown of its features. We also have others listed on our class wiki, and most of them are free is $$$ is a concern.
ReplyDeleteNice site. I watched the video, but didn't sign up for it. I immediately thought of using this as a tool for character mapping, where students would use a similar graphic organizer to highlight motives, flaws, and other aspects of a character in a short story or novel. This would be a fun tool to let students create a much more creative character map, where they could link specific traits to online resources. They could also create their own analysis of a character trait, and then post that to the corresponding item in their mind-meister.
ReplyDeleteI think students benefit from graphic organizers, especially something like mind mapping. Mind Meister seems very user friendly from what I watched on the video. This would be a great tool to help students prepare for presentations and brainstorm in projects. For secondary English Language Arts, this would be a great tool for learning about writers. Students could create branches to include bigraphical information and writing style. Their mind map could be used as a presentation or even an outline for a paper. In elementary, students could use MindMeister for mind mapping colors and objects that demonstrate those colors, to help students learn about colors - just a thought, I'm not Elementary Ed!
ReplyDeleteWow! Thank you for providing us the website. There are lots of information in it. I also like mindmeister which is amazing. Students who are visual learners would benefit from the tool. Moreover, users can also upload an attachment in mindmeister, and I really like the idea!!!
ReplyDelete