Outline Creator: What Do You Use?
My 8th grade Humanities students have a series of projects to create to share their learning from our current expedition. One project is a research report. The students recorded their research in Mindmeister and I would like them to move into outlining their information using a free online or software tool. I did a search and came up with an online tool created by Holly Samuels and Jim Constantine. What I would really like is something Web 2.0ish where students could easily collaborate on outlines while also giving me 24/7 access to make comments as well.
What do you use with your students?
Inspiration software recently released http://mywebspiration.com/ in Beta.
From their site: Whether working individually or collaboratively, Webspiration™ is the new online visual thinking tool that helps you:
* capture ideas
* organize information
* diagram processes
* create clear, concise written documents
With integrated diagram and outline views you can think visually, structure your work effectively and express your ideas in the ways that communicate best.
OR … you could make a template in Google Docs !!!
I recently discovered the Notetaker
http://interactives.mped.org/view_interactive.aspx?id=722&title=
from Read/Write/Think on the Thinkfinity website (http://www.thinkfinity.org).
Hi David,
For what I think you’re looking for, I can’t think of anything better off the top of my head than Inspiration. Students can work in either mindmap view or outline view and there is plenty of functionality for adding comments and other bits of information. The software can be downloaded for a free 30 day trial and they just went live with a free online version at webspiration.com.
That being said I very recently came across a very interesting tool from Tufts Univ. called VUE,
(vue.tufts.edu). This is the writeup from their website: The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) is an Open Source project based at Tufts University. The VUE project is focused on creating flexible tools for managing and integrating digital resources in support of teaching, learning and research. VUE provides a flexible visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information.
I haven’t had the chance to take it for a real test drive, but it looks very interesting and they continue to improve on it.
Hi David,
Another mindmap/visual organiser application is MindNode.
I use wikis (for example, wikispaces or wikis in Moodle) for outlines. If you use wikispaces, the students can then add comments for example to suggest why they made changes, explain the updates and the discussion tab is useful for giving feedback.
I just blogged about the same thing in early october. I came up with three good ones: http://edulicious.com/?p=131 (mindmeister and mywebspiration among them).
What great comments and leads to tools. I spent some time following up on all of your ideas. Thanks. The VUE is one where I will spend some more time as it looks to be a very interesting presentation tool as well as mind mapper. MyInspiration is a total winner if the pricing is reasonable once it comes out of beta. I like that you can connect all the nodes to each other and not just to a central one. My wife is a huge Inspiration user but was missing out on the collaborative possibilities of something like Mindmeister. She will be delighted to learn about this new Web 2.0 version. Brett also is wondering what the catch will be and I bet MyInspiration will be a fee service.
The Outlining tool from Read-Write-Think was exactly what I was thinking about for my students pre-writing efforts. I already followed Collette’s advice and set up a Google Doc with an outline built in for my students but next time might have them use the Outlining tool before they move their outlines into a collaborative document. And I could have used a wiki as well. So lots of choices…just what I was hoping for from this post.