#Best mind mapping software windows 2017 free#
For those seeking an alternative free tool, draw.io is robust and allows you to create basic mind maps easily and save them to Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, or your local device. To learn more about LucidChart, one of the most feature-rich collaborative mind-mapping tools available today, see The Beginner’s Guide to Lucidchart. He welcomes faculty and instructors to give mind mapping a try and see how it may be able to enhance their own classroom pedagogy. He encouraged his students to pursue mind mapping on their own and then build their arguments upon it in their second course paper, as a way to stimulate outside-the-box thinking. This way students will already be familiar with the tool and ready to use it at the point at which you have integrated the tool into your lesson plan.Īdams was so pleased with the success of his exercise that he is already planning future ways to integrate mind mapping into his pedagogy.
Impact and Lessons for the FutureĪdams advises others who are interested in using mind-mapping software to introduce their chosen tool as early as possible. This sort of free association, he believes, is immensely valuable for introducing students to the complex thought processes necessary to produce strong historical scholarship. Adams was pleased with the outcome of the exercise he felt that it helped the students to break out of the box of categorization and make new associations that deepened their historical thinking. Wagner and Brahms, who are commonly portrayed as antitheses in terms of their musical styles, but who shared influences from 19th-century German nationalism.Īn example mind map created in Lucidchart, showing how the use of the German language in their vocal music connects Wagner and Brahms The ResultsĪlthough the mind-mapping exercise was a one-time exercise, it brought together ideas that had been introduced over time since the beginning of the course, and so served as a summative exercise to help Adams’s students re-frame the material they had been presented with, in preparation for writing their second course paper. The map that resulted from the students’ collaboration showed surprising links between figures and concepts the students had previously envisioned as separate - e.g. He took pains to stress that the exercise was low-stakes, and that his students should feel free to express themselves without worrying about making mistakes. Adams began by setting up approximately half the framework of the chart, then invited his students, working collaboratively as a group, to think of new connections between items on the chart and join them. The ExerciseĪdams’s mind-mapping exercise was carried out in Week 7 of Spring Quarter, in conjunction with a discussion of Romanticism in music and art.
Like most mind-mapping tools, it had a relatively easy learning curve, which made it ideal for his purposes. He was already familiar with a mind-mapping tool called Lucidchart, having explored it in workshops held jointly by Academic Technology Solutions and CCT, and decided early on in the quarter to introduce it to his students at some point. To help combat this tendency and break down the walls between categories, Adams sought a tool that was well suited to depicting webs of connections in graphical format. Romantic music, as a result of the secondary sources’ representing the course material in terms of neatly defined, clearly distinct categories. Adams found that his students were sometimes grappling with a tendency to create rigid genre binaries, such as Classical vs. In Adams’s discussion section, held once a week for 50 minutes with a class size of 10, students were asked to engage closely with secondary source readings and draw upon them to illuminate particular pieces of music, such as Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D Minor or Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
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