Mindmeister

This week's social media tool was Mindmeister. Mindmeister is unique as it lets one create an online web for just about anything. A web can be created for a person's schedule, their presentation, or like what we had to do for our research paper, an outline. This corresponds with E-Learning since it helps someone stay organized. Mindmeister also allows multiple people to edit one web. This would be useful for group work.

Mindmeister's main function is to help organize people. A web is like a more visual outline of something. Mindmester allows people to set their webs to public and allow their friends to edit and add on to their original web. These friends could also be coworkers too. I can see businesses using this tool to help organize presentations for their company.

The most interesting thing I found about Mindmeister is its uniqueness. I remember doing webs way back in elementary school when I was writing papers. This site takes that same idea, and puts it into the technology world. I have never heard of any other website out there that allows this same process. I like how easy it is to use too. All one has to do is just class the add button to add topics and delete to delete them. There is a lot of customizing available too. I just stuck to the basic overlay, but Mindmeister allows for different background layouts, fonts, colors, etc.

The most challenging part of Mindmeister, I found, was trying to move the subtopics to my subtopics. I would have my web branch out to subtopics, but then I wanted my subtopics to have subtopics. This was fine for me, but when I wanted to spread those ideas out more, they would become their own branch from the main topic. This was frustrating because if I had a lot of content on one sub-branch, it would be squished next to the branch right below it.

Mindmeister helps communications. As previously stated, one can add friends to add and edit to their webs. This is helpful to express each others ideas. The best part of this is that the site automatically saves EVERYTHING so I could look back and see what edits someone did if we were sharing a web.

Overall, I think Mindmeister is a great tool. It allows people to stay organized (something that I very much appreciate) and is very easy to use. I also like that the site saves my webs. This way there is no reason for me to lose what I have done. If it were on a piece of paper, there is a good chance I could lose that somehow, but since this is on the internet, it is available to me virtually anywhere.