Thinking+Tools

= = 

toc = = = = =Mindmapping =



There are many commercial applications that cost a lot of money to help students develop their thinking skills. Many of these are highly effective, such as //Inspiration// or //Microsoft Visio//. However, part of the focus on this page is to point students and teachers in the direction of online solutions that are free and easy to use. Often they require individuals to sign up, which typically means providing a name and an email address. Mindomois an interesting package that is free but requires a login as does Mindmeister. The beauty of these programs is that students can produce planning frameworks any time without any expensive software at all. Also, both of these sites allow for **collaboative mindmaps** to be produced.





Back to top

=**Wordle** =

On the surface, Wordle can simply look like a fun way to play with words. The word clouds that Wordle produces are based on the frequency of words in a given piece of text. So, rather than being a simple oddity, Wordle can be used to visually represent the rhetorical teachniques of speakers. We can immediately see strong differences between the rhetoric of Presidents Obama and Bush, and Prime Minister Rudd's sorry speech seems much more politically oriented than Rev. Martin Luther King's seminal speech.









Back to top