Today’s Faculty Focus article is on using mind maps to get students to engage with the course material. While the author recommends using a large sheet of a paper, I would ask faculty to consider pointing their students to SpiderScribe.net.
Earlier this year I wrote about SpiderScribe. (See this blog post.) It has a very short learning curve, and with the ability to include text, images, URLs, and documents, the maps that students create could be very powerful study aids.
Using the share feature, students could work in pairs or groups to create the maps. No need to print them off. Students can add their instructor as a ‘reader’ so the instructor can stop in to see how the map is progressing. Alternatively, students can save the map as an image and email it to their instructor.
While I really like this tool, I should note that it’s still technically in beta. As of this writing, there hasn’t been an update to the SpiderScibe blog since June.
