O.K. I have tried both Gliffy and Bubbl.us. Both make my work look more professional. Both took me way more time than I wanted to spend. I will not try either with my students until I get a better grip on the applications. If I were sharing this product with other teachers or parents, I see an advantage over pencil and paper. After completing both maps, I realized how much more work I have to do in terms of collecting information.Gliffy felt more familiar to me. It has many more options than Bubbl. It also has a price if you are going to be a regular user. I like the saving feature (it saves multiple versions) and the ease of export. It also has collaboration potential, but I have not experimented with that as yet.
In conclusion, I feel as though these concept maps could be an asset to the inquiry process. I feel as though they have helped me assess the information I have, decide what more I need, and organize my final product. Once I learn the ins and outs of the software, I believe these tools could help me do a better job than I could do without them. According to Judi Harris, author of Virtual Architecture, you should consider two questions when exploring new technology: Does it allow me to do something I couldn't do before? and Does it allow me to do something better than I could before? Harris writes that if you can answer 'yes' to either of those questions then the technology MAY be worth your time and energy to learn more about.
P.S. You can see I had a little posting error below. That is my attempt at posting the image as html instead of a jpg. I had size issues that I did not know how to fix, but left the image to demonstrate the clarity.
3 comments:
Thanks for the mention! A couple bits of info for you:
An upcoming release will greatly increase the number of public diagrams a free account can have, so it could be more useful to you (check back in a couple weeks)
We have academic discounts available (50% of multi-user accounts). These could be very useful in a classroom setting, as the diagrams would only be viewable by users of your account; further, our upcoming release will have folders, so you can assign permissions per folder; keeping some private for you and others available to all students in your account.
We're also working on making mind-mapping simpler.
Anyway, thanks again for checking us out!
Hi Joe,
Looks like your inquiry has morphed into an investigation of mapping and diagrams. I'm really interested in what you are finding. I don't know if you've checked out my DC blog lately, but I commented on how much I use lists and stay away from concept maps and other (what seem to me to be) chaotic diagrams.
I like what you've been posting on your blog, someday , maybe I'll lighten up and stray from my lists, charts and tables!
I organized my info in a way students could easily read. I narrowed my resources considerably since I have decided to invite the students into this inquiry process.
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