In the Writing and Research Strand, you reviewed tutorials on using concept maps to help you collect and organize your ideas about writing. In this lesson, we introduce you to a number of tools - several free - that you may use to construct a concept map for your topic. It's strictly optional, but I wanted you to understand what is available.
One of the most popular concept mapping tools in education, Inspiration (and sister product, Kidspiration) offers students and adults a fun and easy way to organize their projects, ideas, and writing. Take a tour or download a free 30-day trial to see it for yourself. If you're currently working in a school, you might ask if they have it available for you to use in a classroom or lab. If you decide to purchase it, you can take advantage of academic pricing from any number of software retailers including Academic Superstore. Academic pricing is generally between $50 and $60. Inspiration has a handy Notes feature that is perfect for keeping track of quotations and citation information.
Developed by the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Cmap Tools is a free concept mapping tool. If you'd like to give it a try, download Cmap Tools to see if it will satisfy your needs as a graduate student and in your classroom. Cmap Tools offers fewer features than Inspiration.
Gliffy is a new, free, web-enabled drawing tool. You can create a variety of drawing types, collaborate with others, and publish your results to the web or to a wiki. Watch the demo movie or try it for yourself.
This list is not comprehensive, by any means. You may also have heard of FreeMind, NovaMind, OmniGraffle, Mind Manager or others. You can search the web for other options.
In two weeks, you will turn in an outline of your research paper. You can create your outline in a owrd processor or experiment with some of these tools to see if one of them is right for you. It's up to you!
| Many thanks to the Graphics Communications classes at City College of San Francisco for making the icons used on this page and for making them publicly available. |