I’m loving MindMeister
This past December I decided to upgrade my MindMeister account for one year. I had played enough with MindMeister that I knew I really wanted to seriously play and needed more than the three mindmaps that the free account would give me. I have not regretted this purchase at all! I’ve built mindmaps for:
- Workshop Home/Resource Page
- Collaborative Notetaking at a Conference, as well as a
- More Formal Presentation.
What I found while developing the last mindmap about 21st Century Literacies, as well as another workshop mindmap about my teaching/course organization philosophy (below), is that my outlining my thoughts, ideas, notes, and thinking in this application, I usually make connections I did not see before.
On the one hand, I’m not surprised by this! This is what all the proponents of mind and/or cluster mapping talk about; however, as one of those more linear thinkers that succeeded in a school system that privileged linear thinking...I had never found much of a use for mindmapping. What is now fun is that I have to try to convince my colleagues that although they may think linearly and can’t imagine working in such an environment, they need to acknowledge that some of their students might work and think better with this type of a tool. In other words, we might be able to see students demonstrating learning in this environment in a manner that was not possible before. For example, I loved the variety of formats different students of my demonstrating in taking notes from the same five or six chapters of reading:
- example 1
- example 2
- example 3
- example 4
Similarly, instead of having students write up bad reflection essays or end of term papers, I gave them the option of presenting in MindMeister. Check out both this, and this, example; be sure to read the notes and open the nodes to see all of the thinking and writing that went into these documents. I had a few other students do great jobs with colors and uploading images.
I was also ecstatic to learn that MindMeister has a history/timeline tool that allows users who have view or edit access to the document to see who made what changes at what point within the timeline. This not only allows individuals to see earlier versions, but to revert to them as well. The timeline also provides the names of the users who made particular changes (think of what this might mean for collaborative assignments!).
This review of MindMeister is actually functioning as my demonstration of acquiring new skills for my 2010 Faculty Evaluation Plan; however, I am happy to rant and rave. I will be honest and say that Mindomo is also a great mind/cluster mapping tool that does a lot of the same things. At this point I can say that I will probably maintain my subscription (I guess it depends on my budget); however, I will definitely keep assigning these tools in my classes. I can’t wait to try an assignment where students use the ranking and due dates features as well.
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