Word clouds, timelines, and mind maps

There's a lovely article in one of the New York Times' blogs from this weekend about consumer tools to use in the classroom. I shouldn't even call them consumer tools, as they're programs available to everyone for free. But they're not tools that we in faculty computing need to set up or authorize for you - they're out there and you can use them whenever you like.

There are some great ideas for using wordles/word clouds, especially to help students visualize the main concepts of a piece of prose or to identify words to look up. And the timeline tools are new to me. I can think of some great uses for building a timeline with a class. I know Professor Cox, for instance, has his students build a short history of psychology in one of his classes - perhaps a timeline would be useful to them, in addition to or instead of a wiki. I can imagine all sorts of patterns turning up if students were able to collaborate on a timeline, adding what they thought were pertinent points of development as they go and seeing each other's contributions. I don't know if any of these tools allow for collaboration.

But I do think they left one of the best tools out of the mind map/brainstorming category. I have long used Inspiration myself and I've shown it to some Boot Camps as well. They have a new product Webspiration which I believe is free and which this article doesn't mention. Inspiration itself is well worth the purchase price (and I don't say that about much software) for any student or for that matter faculty member who needs to organize ideas or research into writing. I love the feature that, with the click of a button, turns your mind map into a linear outline that you can continue to edit in Word. This tool helped me throughout graduate school and beyond and I can't imagine that any other writer wouldn't also it useful. The Webspiration version has all the key features and seems to work well.

One other tool I'll mention for the writing crowd, since I know we have a number of filmmakers and journalists over in our School of Communication: Scripped, at http://scripped.com, is the GoogleDocs of screenwriting. It's free and your documents live online and you can collaborate live with others as well. I used the standard film script format and it worked flawlessly for me. Worth checking out before you invest in a paid product if a student is just going to try one scriptwriting class.