Even before the digital era started, mindmaps had long been used in education for organizing and presenting information. Today, digital mindmapping solutions allow easy collaboration and sharing. However, the abundance of web-based software for creating mindmaps makes it difficult to find the right tool that meets your and your students’ needs. I have tried several applications and I will describe two of my favorites here: Mindmeister and Miro.
Free versions of Mindmeister and Miro
Both Mindmeister and Miro offer several payment plans, but I used the basic free versions. While Mindmeister’s main feature is creating mindmaps, Miro is simply an online whiteboard platform that can be used for multiple purposes, including mindmapping. The free versions enable users to create three mindmaps collaboratively and to share these online by a link. Other ways of export such as downloading a pdf or image are not included in the basic plan.
Inviting collaborators is easy, but they need to set up an account to be able to work on the mindmaps. Both tools have a user-friendly design and provide tutorial videos and texts accessible on the interface, which makes it very easy even for first-time users to create mindmaps.
Mindmapping tasks for Tourism English
I have often used mindmaps in my English for Tourism classes to organize concepts and information in topics we deal with. In my experience, creating and using mindmaps for studying help students understand and remember information better.
One of the tasks my students were collaborating on was to consider the positive and negative impacts of tourism. One group (3-4 students) created a mindmap for positive effects and the other group for negative effects. Students found the task challenging, but also both fun and useful. The mindmaps were shared with the whole study group of 18 students, who can then use all of them for preparing to address these issues and topics in English.
See here our Mindmeister mindmap – Negative effects of tourism and our Miro mindmap – Positive effects of tourism
Text and Image: Réka Asztalos, Budapest Business School, Hungary