There are plenty of mindmapping sites now out there, but yesterday, I decided that my students would use Webspiration, the online companion to the very popular Inspiration software. Webspiration is wonderful and I sing its praises. It’s free (yeah). It’s easy to use (yeah). And you can share and embed the concept maps that you create on other websites (yeah).

I wonder why it is free since it does much of what Inspiration can do, although I guess the newest versions of the software has a lot of bells, whistles and possibilities. I just wanted a site for some collective brainstorming and Webspiration sure fit the bill.

Here’s what we were doing: As we are reading Three Cups of Tea, we are talking deep about the theme of the book — how a character is faced with challenges and then overcomes those challenges. In this book, as most people know by now, the protagonist — Greg Mortenson — wants to build a school in Pakistan but runs into roadblocks every step of the way.

Next week, my students will be writing in-depth about the challenges to building a school, so we worked on a concept map to help them think through the challenges.

Here is what one class came up with (by the way — if you are in Google Reader or some RSS, you may not see the embed so here is a direct link to the Webspiration map):

Peace (in the map),
Kevin