Nadia's learning journal: Design a mindmap for an educational project

Hello everyone!

Today I would like to share with you a mind map about the next project I will carry out with my students. This project of Natural Sciences is about Biological Kingdoms. But before I show and explain it to you I'm going to describe and comment my experience using some tools to create mind maps.

At the beginning when I decided to create a mind map to explain my project and make the explanation more visual I chose Bubbl.us because it is an app that I used before when I was studying at the university to make mind maps for different subjects. However, this app has changed a lot in the last year and now if you want to add images or videos you have to pay. The free version only allows you to insert URL. Moreover, you cannot change the shape of the text boxes.

For all these reasons I changed the app to create my project mind map. After looking for a while I decided to use...

This app is better than the other one and it gives you a lot of different options to create more visual and engaging mind maps. It has a free version that offers you the opportunity to create 5 mind maps. Besides, it guides you through the app showing the different tools when you create your first mind map. As well, it shows to you some examples of mind maps created by other authors, so you can see how your mind map could be.

The main tools of this app are the three different letters size, three text position, and colours and shapes for the text boxes. In addition, you can insert images and videos or draw your own pictures to make your mind map more visual. Some time ago you could insert videos from Youtube, but now you can only add videos from Vimeo which is private. This is a pity because Vimeo does not offer as many videos as Youtube and this limit Popplet app. You cannot add sounds either. Nevertheless, it is a good app that I like because is easy to use and it offers to you nice tools to create mind maps in a more creative way.

This is my mind map about Biological Kingdoms. This mind map explains the activities that I designed for my students. As it is known, we can find 5 Biological or Natural Kingdoms. In the mind map each kingdom is distinguishable with a colour as well as their activities. I created two activities for work each kingdom. To make the explanation more visual I added some images about the different activities. These images are free images from Pixabay, or they are created by myself using Paint 3D app. This way of presenting a project makes it more visual and understandable for students. Like this they will be more interested in what they are going to do and the can follow the whole process in an organized way.