Online Concept Mapping June 9, 2009
Posted by nitwit in Uncategorized.Tags: concept mapping
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Concept mapping is a powerful tool for helping students organize their understanding of a topic. Although concept maps can be built with low technology (pencil and paper), some of the advantages of new technologies can expand the benefits of concept mapping in the classroom. Online applications make it possible for students to save their maps and to access them and work on them wherever they have Intenet access. Some of the newer tools also allow collaborative editing, meaning that the maps can be shared with other students in the class and editing by anyone who has been given access to them.
There are a number of these tools and plenty of free ones. There tends to be a trade-off between ease of use and how robust the tool is. Jane Hart has the ultimate list of tech tools and you can look at over 30 mindmapping tools that she reviews, but I wanted to highlight a couple of great options.
bubbl.us
On the easy end is bubbl.us. There isn’t a lot of space for content, so this is more for topics and single word or phrase bubbles. But you can create subtopics just by clicking Enter and you can change the way something is linked to another topic just by dragging it onto the other bubble. It is easy to color-code items with a full color pallate and they can be arranged however you want with ease as well. Add email addresses for those with whom you want to share the map and, after they create a free account, they can also edit the work in progress. Limited space for information, and no way to tag the relationships between topics are the biggest drawbacks at this point for this tool.
Cmap
Cmap is a more robust tool that you download, for free, and install on your machine. It allows you a lot of choices for the shape and size of the boxes, you can label the relational connectors to get a better understanding of the structure of information (for example, something is labeled as “causing something else” or “is an example of”, etc.) The Cmap boxes handle as much text as you need to explain things more completely. Not having the maps available online in a collaborative editing environment is the biggest downside to this tool.
