Drumroll Please…
My mindmap answers a question I’ve been asked hundreds of times over the last few years. I wanted to explore a few of the different options, plus give the necessary skills and other possible careers beneath each subnode. If i decide to pursue a career in higher education, I will work with many future English majors, and will share the many possible careers and English degree (or advanced degree, in my case) can lead to besides the obvious teaching route. I chose a monochromatic color scheme since all my ideas are related, and wanted the colors to reflect that. Additionally, I chose to use a blue scheme since it’s a calming color, and what can be more stressful than having to answer THAT question a million times?
Feedback
I think ExamTime and the mindmapping was user friendly, easy to learn and navigate, and basic. I like how there weren’t hundreds of options. I was able to make my mindmap in about an hour and a half, which is good for me since I tend to get caught up in the visuals of most presentations. I spent most of my time brainstorming the content than playing around with the nodes and moving them around. Okay, I did spend a lot of time moving the nodes around. But I’m human! This tool is extremely user friendly, but I do have a few criticisms. First, I wish there was a tutorial for the first-time I used this. There were a few prompts, but I like a quick demonstration and explanation of all the buttons. It took me a few minutes just to find the preview button.
Additionally, I had no idea that the nodes I created would be presented in the order they were created until I previewed my presentation. For a tool that is supposed to break free from linear teaching, you have to create the project linearly or the nodes will be all over the place. Lucky for me, I did this, but I’m still disappointed that you can’t manually choose the order of the nodes, an aspect of Prezi that I was really missing. I did, however, choose to add pictures to my mindmap after I created all the text nodes. However, after finally reading the FAQ section, I learned that pictures should be placed either behind or in front of the node when you create it originally, or else they won’t be shown until the end, like mine. I’m annoyed with this but I wasn’t going to redo my whole mindmap to get the pictures to match up. Looking at my mindmap as a whole, the images break up all the text, so I didn’t want to delete them either.
A Teaching Tool?
I’m torn on whether I would recommend this presentation tool to students. I would probably want to pair it with a tutorial video before unleashing them to make the same mistakes I did. Plus, I worry about students choosing pictures before their text is written. I’ve seen the time that can be wasted looking for that perfect picture before all the information is written. I’ve been guilty of that too in the past, but this time I wasn’t, and was penalized for it. I do like how the relationships between ideas and nodes is easily demonstrated with this service. Additionally, I like how users are limited to the amount of text you can write in each node and subnode.
Overall, I think I would use this in the future for my own learning though I wish there were a few advanced options available to control the order of the nodes and the presentation styles. Although the simplicity of this tool cannot be overstated, I would prefer just a few more options to personalize my presentation a little more.
writing by amanda 