Cool Tool Review #5

Greetings friends!

This week my Cool Tool Review is on bubbl.us This site helps you brainstorm your ideas and watch them grow as you go. I think that this tool would be essential in the classroom! A student could use this for all sorts of assignments in different subjects whether it be History, English, Music, Science, and so on.

This site was really easy to use once I got the hang of making the branches off other topics connect where I wanted them to be. That may have been my lack of skills quite honestly. What I enjoyed about it was picking a topic, and then thinking of sub topics to branch off of the main idea and continue to make more branches off of the sub topics. It really got me thinking of all these different components of my topic and how they are related.

Here is the link to the site: https://bubbl.us/mindmap

For my example, I put myself in the shoes of a student who had to pick a style of music and brain storm the components that come with it for a Music Appreciation class. I chose Disco Music Components as my topic. I am not a big fan of Disco music to be honest (although I do dig the slap bass and the funk that comes with it).                                                        
Here is the link to my example: https://bubbl.us/?h=32952a/652db6/33M2tYdVeHhGw&r=1234714629

    

Here is the boring part, the pricing. You can sign up and use the Free Version, which is great. It is $6.00 a month for a Premium account, $59.00 for a whole year, and there is a "Team" option. This was really neat because its a sweet deal for teachers and students. When you click on pricing, the website will ask, "Is This team for a school?" Click yes and there are two options: If you have up to 50 users, the price is $3.00 a month per user or if you have more than 50 users, it is $1.00 per user a month. Sweet deal! It is refreshing to find a great and extremely useful tool that will give a discount for schools.

Again, this all comes back to TPACK. Knowing how to use this technology/site and being able to teach it to your students. Also, giving them the content and making sure they understand the content of both this tool and the content you are teaching so they can properly brain storm their ideas.

Therefore, friends, I urge you to check out this tool! I believe this to be essential to your future classroom!

-Mark