Mind maps are an excellent technique for students to perform connections among concepts and to help them think about subjects. They can be used as a nice revision tool as well. In our course, one of the activities in Module 4, Music as a language, deals with creating a mind map about some of the music theory concepts. We will use a tool called Mindomo to create this mind map.
Mindomo (http://www.mindomo.com) is an online mind map software that we can use to create multimedia mind maps with text, videos, images, and hyperlinks.
With a basic free account, we can create three mind maps. After signing up, we can create a new mind map by clicking on the Create button on the dashboard.
We are then required to fill in some details about the map and when done, hit the Ok button.
The most important functions for a start are, to add topic and subtopic (present on the top toolbar), and add multimedia elements to the topics (present on the left toolbar).
For now, let's start by giving the main topic the name Music, and add some more subtopics by clicking on the Topic option and then on Subtopic:
We will get something like this:
To add videos, images, or hyperlinks, follow these steps:
As an example, let's see how to add a YouTube video to the Harmony subtopic.
After clicking on the Add Multimedia button in the left toolbar, we can search for videos on YouTube (or Vimeo) or directly add the URL of the video:
We will get something similar to the following screenshot, with videos showing up inside the subtopic:
Besides videos, we can record audio notes, upload videos, add hyperlinks or images.
Finally, we can save the mind map by clicking on the Save option under the File menu item found in the upper-left corner. To get the URL or embed code for Moodle integration, so that we can share the mind map, there is a Share button in the upper-right corner. If we click on this button, and then on Embed in website, the embed code will be copied to the clipboard, and we can then paste it in Moodle.
