Mind Map Software Review – XMind
My daughter is a visual learner. She loves looking at maps, prefers looking at groupings of items for counting than flash cards, and takes hands-on art classes at every opportunity. When my wife teaches history with the kids, she does long timelines in the house, and with my daughter, she creates mind maps in a notebook.
What is a mind map? I like the wikipedia definition:
A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.
I decided to take it a step further and incorporate some technology with the mind map and see how she liked it. I owned xmind already, so thought we’d try it together for her science assignment on Wombats.
My one word review: Excellent.
Xmind has a very intuitive interface. I turned the controls over to my (now) 9 year old daughter and she got started right away. The interface starts you off with a topic in the middle of the screen. Adding sub-topics, and sub-sub-topics etc., is very easy.
The site integrates a browser inside the application, so you can perform text or image searches and easily move the text or image into your mind map. This was the highlight for my daughter, finding the pictures that she wanted to put in her project.
The tool has got deep functionality but that doesn’t get in the way of someone who wants to skim the surface of what it can do. When we finished, xmind gave us several ways to present the data: an image, a pdf, or, our favorite, as a slideshow moving from sub-topic to sub-topic. This project was everything you want a project to be, my daughter learned about her topic, she had to organize the information, she got comfortable with a tool that was not frustrating to her, and she enjoyed presenting the information to us because of the slideshow manner. We even emailed the image to grandparents for them to see as well.
I highly recommend this software for yourself or for your kids if you are, or have a visual learner.
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