Thursday, 12 April 2012

Group Four Tools

For group four, we were required to use two tools of our own choosing. The tools I used were bubbl.us for creating mind maps and Dipity for creating interactive timelines.

Mind Maps

View my mind maps post - (click here)

Mind maps are a kind of graphic organiser that allows you to visually depict the relationship between related areas of a topic. They are incredibly useful for brainstorming, visual note taking and organising information. Here is a PMI for mind maps.

Plus
  • Quick and easy to create
  • Intuitively easy to understand
  • Breaks down information gradually for easy analysis
  • Draws visual connections between topics
  • Organises data into a parent/sibling relationship
  • Encourages organisation
  • Scaffolded format
  • Easily distributable
Minus
  • Can become overwhelming if there is too much data to follow
  • Link between bubbles may not be outwardly apparent
Interesting
  • Promotes connecting prior knowledge (constructivism) but also thinking about thought process (cognitivism)

Online Timeline

View the post containing my example online timeline - (click here)

Dipity is a web app that allows you to create online timelines, which are useful for a number of purposes. It allows for much greater pedagogy then standard hand-written timelines due to its ability to include multimedia, links to external sources and integration with Youtube videos. I found it was actually very enjoyable exploring information set out in a Dipity timeline, and liked that it was so engaging.

Here is a PMI for the online timeline:

Plus
  • Very engaging to the user
  • Intuitive layout
  • Good multimedia integration
  • Visual depiction of a chronology
Minus
  • SLOW! I think the server might have been having problems when I used this service, because it would take minutes to load, and sometimes say unavailable. If this was happening regularly I would not be using the service.
Interesting
  • A very large or small time-frame can be covered
  • Activities can be linked for topics
  • So many potential uses
Some uses of this program could include:
  • Timeline of art, music, etc. development
  • Timeline of a technology's evolution
  • Personal major events
  • Interactive calendar of upcoming events

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