Thing #14

I chose to register and try out gliffy.com (more about how hilarious that is in a moment) and mindmeister.com. I'm really not that "into" visual aids but I know I'll have students who are visual learners and who would really love having flowcharts and/or mindmaps incorporated into the curriculum and into test review. I also think that my content area--secondary social studies--is really conducive to using these kinds of aids to show how many elements and ideas are interrelated.

I found gliffy.com pretty easy to use but I didn't think that the flowchart options made for a very pretty flowchart. call me an aesthetic elitist, but that kind of stuff is important to me. I recently contemplated joining an online group lobbying for the elimination of Comic Sans (seriously). Now for why the word "gliffy" is extra funny to me: my family has been using the word gliffy for 35 years now to describe all manner of things that are ooky (I guess that's a made up word too), too sweet, too goey, too...well...gliffy. A good example might be an ice cream sundae topped with marshmallow peeps. My dad originally coined the term in 1967 to describe gross, goopy feeling of the bottom of a lake under his feet. I'm going to have to call him later to let him know that he should have copyrighted it.

...moving right along...

I actually enjoyed mindmeister.com a lot. The site was pretty (see above), the tools were easy to use, and I loved that they had created a mindmap for me upon registration to teach me about how to use the site and the other tools associated with it. I could definitely see myself using this in the classroom or using it to create handouts for the students to create their own mindmaps...or some combination of both where we create one together as a class. Now I need to get started on a mindmap about the connection between mustaches and evil so that I can get my husband to see the error of his ways in deciding that growing a mustache while he's deployed is a great idea.