I’ve been using a web-app called Mindomo for about two years now. With it I am able to map out ideas and create interactive sets of resources in a non-linear fashion. You may have seen some of my resources or been in a presentation where I used one of these maps:

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I think that using these interactive maps gives three main advantages:

  1. If you present with a map, you are no longer forced into a linear presentation and can easily respond and adapt to audience questions.
  2. The audience can play along during the presentation, wandering off to explore the areas of the map that interest them most.  This is the same idea behind Edward Tufte’s “supergraphic” – a data-rich resource that the audience becomes engaged with, each person in their own context.
  3. The process of creating a mindmap helps to organize resources and ideas, think of applications to ideas, fosters thinking about comparisons and contrasts, and helps you to see the holes where information or resources are missing, all in a very visual manner.

It is this third item that has me particularly intrigued.  When I begin building a new presentation, I now find it helpful to organize a mindmap as one of the first activities I do.  The process of building the map teaches me more than I would ever learn on my own.

This year I’m planning to put this idea to the student test and have each student in my MET class (Math for Elementary Teachers) create a Mindomo mindmap for one of the units as one of their four Learning Projects.  The Mindomo accounts are free (for up to 6 maps) as long as you are willing to live with a 1-inch wide strip of advertising on the right-hand side.

I had been stressing over the need to create a tutorial video, but one of our workshop participants (Rose Jenkins of Teching Up) has created a fabulous video on getting started with Mindomo (click here for her tutorial).  I’m planning on just sending my students right to Rose’s video for their introductory tutorial on using Mindomo.mindomo2

Rose has also got an interesting idea for pushing out a partially-created mindmap to her statistics students, and then asking them to add the appropriate resources and annotations to the map (Read her post, Mapping Out Math).  It was a little tricky to figure out HOW to create a map and then share it to students in a way that makes each copy their own, but Rose made a tutorial about THAT too! (click here for the tutorial about sharing maps)

Kudos to Rose for taking charge of a set of tutorials that really needed to be made!