Last Friday morning I received an email from a company touting the greatness of their new AI-powered mind mapping tool. My response was, “That’s not a mind map.”
I tried the company’s product and it made good concept maps that connected a lot of elements related to my initial themes. But he made concept maps, he didn’t make mental maps. The company’s mistake was using the terms mind maps and concept maps interchangeably. It is a mistake that many people make.
Mind Maps vs. Concept Maps
Mind mapping is a process that students can use to think through and document the connections they make between a central concept and the terms, phrases, and ideas that connect it. AI cannot replace that process because the goal is to get students to record their own thinking and illustrate the connections they make between concepts and ideas.
Concept mapping is a process that seems similar to mind mapping, but there are a couple of notable differences. First, a concept map often has a hierarchical structure that is used to show the connections and segments of a large concept. Second, when a hierarchical structure is used for a concept map, it is possible to create incorrect connections. For example, a student creating a concept map about the seasons of the year would be incorrect if he placed “leaves change color” as a “winter” branch instead of an “autumn” branch. Concept mapping is a process that AI can achieve.
17 Tools to create mind maps and concept maps
I believe a google doc which describes the features of seventeen mind mapping and concept mapping tools. Below are three highlights from the document.
Capricious is a good tool for creating flowcharts, mind maps, Venn diagrams, and a variety of other charts and diagrams. As you would expect with any tool like this, Whimsical is a collaborative tool. You can invite people to collaborate with you to edit your work or simply comment on it to provide feedback. Charts and diagrams created in Whimsical can be published as simple web pages, kept private, or exported as PNG (image file) or PDF.
MindMup is a mind mapping tool that can be used online, with Google Drive, and on your desktop. MindMup works like most mind mapping tools in that you can create a central idea and add child and sibling nodes on a blank canvas. MindMup nodes can contain text and links. When you’re ready to save your MindMup mind map, you can save it to Google Drive, save it to your desktop, or publish it online. If you post it online, you can get an embed code to post it to a blog post or web page.
Whiteboard templates in Canva are designed to be used collaboratively. They can be used for a variety of purposes, including organizing brainstorming sessions, designing concept maps, and making KWL charts. To help you and your collaborators stay focused on the task at hand, Canva added a timer option to the whiteboard templates. The timer is located in the lower left corner of the templates. You can set the timer to whatever interval works for your group. Look at this video to learn how to use Canva’s whiteboard templates.
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