Popplet Mind Maps

I was getting to ready to work on another post about a great presentation on blended learning that I watched yesterday. I want to compare what was 'old school' (for us K-12ers -- this was for "higher" ed.) to what is really different, but that's a story for another day. Anyway, as usual, I started looking through Google and stopped at Go2Web20 (tag:mindmap).

(click any pic)

I love this search engine. The tagging system is superb, and the blog makes for an interesting reading. The general categories are quite broad to help you see how companies are thinking outside traditional uses of familiar processes. But it's so easy to get sucked into wonderful distractions, that you might not get your work done in a timely fashion. I spent quite a lot of time with Creaza and Trail Me.)

The tool I want to write about today is Popplet which is a collaborative online tool with an iPad app ('lite' vs is free, full-featured is kind of pricey at $4.99).

Other bloggers describe this as a pumped up version of Wallwisher (see Larry Felazzo's blog) because it's a kid-friendly way to collect, bookmark, and organise information, ideas, websites, and media. You can connect Popplets, embed them, and export or print them. Users have to register, but if you have a class gmail account, you can give the students access without their having to put their own information online. I keep the email account name and password the same to make it easy to remember. This is also a great way to control their content.) It will look great on a SmartBoard and there's a little bookmarklet tool for your toolbar so as you come across content that will work with a presentation, you can update the appropriate popplet.

This tool is one I'll be adding to the list people can play with at my workshops.

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BTW -- I also came across Mark Warner's collaborative presentation for uses of WallWisher. I'm sure the ideas can be used with Popplet as well. Enjoy!

https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dhn2vcv5_436f8kscmdc

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Hey! I just figured out how to reduce this presentation to fit in the small display space provided in this blog. Simply cutting the width (to 400 for this blog) and height (proportionally either by estimate or using a ratio -- great math lesson!!!!) in the HTML code, cut off a big chunk of the Google Doc, but reducing with the 'amp' (whatever that is) to .75 as well did the trick. Hmmmm ... there's a lot to be said for trial and error learning when you have the time to play and an environment where there's immediate feeback!