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
Thanks for sharing this example Kevin. I use inspiration a lot for myself and have only recently found webspiration. This was a good reminder about using it with my class. I have only had one brief play with it but I did like the fact that you could collaboratively work on one mind map with someone else at the same time. It would be cool to combine this with a skype conversation and have a group collaborating on an issue onto the same map. Imagine if your kids could have been linked to Pakistan and worked on the mind map together. I must be sad but it is 5 in the morning two days after school has finished for the summer holidays and I am sitting here sparking ideas for next year.
Happy Christmas and thanks for sharing.
Paul
I didn’t even get to the collaborative element of it (we did it as a class) but that would be pretty neat.
Happy holidays to you
Kevin