Slate Box

Many of you have used Inspiration at some point to create mind maps or cluster maps on the computers at school.  Last year, I had my students using Mindomo to create their mind maps for a digital story project and that seemed to work well but I thought that it was a little too comprehensive for what we needed.  Today I found out about Slate Box from one of my favorite blogs "Free Technology for Teachers".  Slate Box is a fast and easy way to get your thoughts down on "paper" and then share them with others through the embed feature.  I really liked the fact that Slate Box was developed using HTML5 because it was very fast and also worked on the iPad.  For those of you who are new to the idea of web-based collaborative mind mapping, this is a very simple site and eliminates all of the extra "stuff" that makes it hard to navigate and use.

Now What?

I really liked how easy it was to get started using  Slate Box and think that it is a great alternative to programs you may already be using in class.  The fact that accounts are free and it can be accessed universally outside of school makes it a great tool to use for both teachers and students.  Examples of classroom uses might include outlining research, planning a long term project, developing a digital story, comparing concepts and more.