Creating educational mind maps

Hello visitors!

My next mission will take place in Japan, for that reason I need to gather as much information as possible to go unnoticed during my stay in the land of the rising sun.

My teacher friend is preparing a project on Japanese culture with his students and he wants to present it using a mind map.

Image by Alex Molina. CC0 Creative Commons

There are different online tools, like Coggle, Mindmeister, Mind42, SpiderScribe or Bubbl.us, but he has chosen Creately. Here is his experience with this tool.

'Creately is fairly intuitive, it offers a wide range of diagrams, not only mind maps (over 40 types with specialized shape sets...even family trees!!). Depending on the diagram you want to use you'll find libraries with more or less variety of objects and shapes ready to use (unfortunately the mind map library is not very extensive, but there are other libraries that are good enough to remedy the situation). It's a good tool to organise ideas, concepts or even to summarize a didactic unit.

You can use either an existing template or create your own. I've chosen creating a new one, adding the objects from the different libraries like shapes and arrows. I had experienced some problems scrolling up and down the objects in the library, it was difficult to view all the objects when loading all the available libraries, so I recommend a quick browse before starting the mind map. 

To create a visually appealing mind map it is also advisable adding your own pictures or background images according to the topic or creating links to expand the information. Creately even provides linking to another mind maps which I have tested out.

In short, Creately is useful to present a project in just one look, it's visually attractive and can help to engage your students in the project. Students perhaps find it tricky to use, it is recommended to show them how it works so they can create their own mind maps.'
 
Good luck with your students! Here's the link to the mind map.