I absolutely love flowcharts with every aspect of my being. They can be extremely informative, hilarious, absurd, educational, and are almost always fun. I am normally a written and auditory learner and have always learned very poorly visually, but I always learn a lot through flowcharts and mind maps and as such I believe they are a very powerful educational tool. Creating flowcharts is never easier with all of the web based applications out there. I had the best experience using Gliffy, mostly because it just was the easiest to use and was very visually pleasing. However, there are many tools that are just as easy to use and it really just comes down to personal preference. While I think it may be rather complicated and hard for a student to create a flowchart, I can imagine a long term project of sorts to make a flowchart relevant to what is being studied. Of course, using them for a lecture, while challenging, could be an effective way to teach students complex topics.
Mind maps are to me, flowcharts distant sibling. They are an extremely effective way to gather a lot of thoughts and compile and relate them together. I find mind maps most helpful when needing to write papers for most of my classes and they are essential for in class essays. I remember in middle and high school being taught how to use mind maps for various reasons and it is a tool that has stuck with me and as such in my own teaching I plan on teaching students how to use them effectively. This task, is pretty easy now mainly due to the ease of creating a mind map online. I chose to use Bubble.us and found it rather easy to use. While some of the controls took a bit of time to get the hang of, once I had them down it was very easy to create a mind map.
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