Welcome, everyone. This is Melinda, and I want to take you through a take 10, so a quick 10 minutes of using the new mind mapping tool that's now in Wixie. Super exciting for us to have released this just a couple of weeks ago.
We're already getting great examples of what people are doing, so I'm sure most of you are already familiar with mind maps. They're great for character traits, putting things in sequence, doing flow charts, taking a whole bunch of ideas, brainstorming very quickly, and then organizing. And, you know, mind maps are a great way to kind of get kids to visualize information, and then by their making it visual, it also gives you an opportunity as a teacher to assess for misunderstanding, help them prioritize, gives you words and text and pictures to help you ask the right questions to help them, again, understand things more deeply.
And also, when they're moving things around and organizing and making those connections, so you're taking ideas or images and you're drawing arrows between them, single direction, double direction, again, to showcase movement of information or priority of information. So lots of really powerful reasons to use those. The mind mapping tools look a little bit different, but are also both available in the primary and the standard interface.
And again, for the younger ones in that primary interface, they're simplified a little bit to make things a little bit quicker and easier as they get used to typing, recording, and again, sharing ideas and organizing and writing. Now, when you are in Wixie, you are going to you can start a mind map two ways. So it's sort of like a tool within a tool.
So it's not if you are in a regular Wixie project, you will not see the mind mapping tools, you have to start a very specific project with that goal in mind. So you can do it from the new button, or you can do it from the project prompts. And let me just exit out the presentation here so you can see that.
So if I am at my homepage for Wixie, and when I'm at my projects, I can go to new. And under new, there's now a mind map, and it will open a new blank mind map. Similarly, there is a prompt on that project bar at the top of every student and teacher home page.
And that is the mind maps button there. That will start sort of a blank one that already has a symbol in the middle, and or it will take advantage or utilize some templates for common types of organizers in mind maps that people might create. I'm seeing more here than you might see because I have all of my grade levels selected.
So if you have narrowed down your grade band within your Wixie app, so you only see stuff because you teach second grade, you only see second grade things, you might not see exactly the same thing that I do. And again, there are this is also available in the primary mode. And I think actually here's a great example.
In primary, the character traits right in the middle here with the four, that's sort of a more of what you'll see in primary and not this multi-level or more ideas or sub traits for that particular map. Same thing, cause and effect, one cause, and then what the effect is, and then multiple causes and multiple effects. Again, based on use by grade band.
But really, let's start with a blank one. This is sort of can be my main idea. So let's say our class is going to get a best pet.
Like what's the best pet? I'm just going to ask people, my students that. And we might brainstorm things like we're going to add a symbol and let's just say cat. And let's add another symbol and let's say bird.
And those are just two right here. We also could do something along the lines of if you hold the shift key down and press enter, it does a connected one already. Easy way to do that.
You'll see that I don't have connections on these other ones. So to connect two ideas, I go and select one of them and there's an arrow right there and I can go over here to bird. Same thing over here and I can go over here.
And again, just go to add symbol and I might say something like gorilla. Not sure that's the most appropriate pet, but again, I can select that. Like Wixie, my screen's a little narrow here so you can't see all the buttons, but the symbol, image, video widgets, all of those things are available.
So again, if I wanted to pick something like a dog, let's see what our options are here. Let's grab this dog here and I can put that on. I can again, I don't have a dog connected, so I can go and attach here.
Now you'll notice it doesn't say dog. Each one of these things has a label in a symbol. The label's right in the middle of it.
And on an image, if I go over to the preferences over here, that's sort of like the options panel when you're working in Wixie. One of the things here I have is a label and let's just look at what it is. Oh, it's already set to dog because of the way the image is.
So that makes it easy. I can also do the same kind of a thing where I could add a talky dog. We'll just add a bulldog there.
And again, I could do it this way. I could adjust and change that. I could also give him a label option.
But you see the talky part there and we'll just say, not just any dog, a bulldog. And again, if I, you know, again, change my voice and adjust that and not just any dog, a bulldog. You can see those, those end up staying that way.
I might want to say if, you know, if my kids are brainstorming and I want to make any changes, let's add a symbol that looks a little different. And we'll just say, actually, maybe it should be up the other way around. Let me look and see if I can find a symbol this way.
There we go. Sort of like a yellow yield sign. And maybe we're going to say not appropriate for the classroom.
Okay. And that might be again. So there's my arrow there.
I don't want that arrow. I'm going to go ahead in here and just delete it. And we're going to drag a new arrow here.
And it's going to still be connected there. Just not maybe appropriate for the classroom. Or maybe I put that little, and again, I could change the color.
I haven't talked about that at all. All of those things are over here again on that preferences panel. So because I'm selecting the background, you see page color.
I can turn it on and off if I need more space to work. But any one of these things, I can change how it looks. And again, maybe for this one, I want to do black text with or black fill with white text to look more like a gorilla since gorillas are dark.
Or maybe make that silver color. But again, you can see I can adjust all of these things. Even videos will work.
I'm sorry, that's widgets. We'll go to video. Let's just look in here.
Do we have any? I'm going to have a fun animal, a fun pet here. How about the jumping lemurs? There we go. And we'll just connect that again to maybe the inappropriate part.
And again, like Wixie, if I wanted to play in here, I can just hit lock, and then we can watch that there. And again, very similarly, if I select it, we're going to unlock it first. But there's my label option, and it even says lemur.
So I can turn that label on. And then again, either play it from my options panel or play it from clicking on it by locking it. And so again, these are working.
Best pets. And we'll go home. And these work.
You can see, look like Wixie projects within my dashboard here. But you'll see down by the file name, where it says best pet, you'll see that light bulb with the option of the same icon that you see here in the mind maps there. So it tells you that it works a little bit differently.
Oh, and in this one, sorry, you'll see this grid is on. Part of that is, I don't know if that will be on forever, but that's again, part of the background. So I can turn that off if I don't want to see a grid there.
I can change my background color and do some other things that way too. But the grid is on by default. And part of that is to help you as you go through the end of the school year, since this is a change mid-year, it will give you a clue that a student has gone into the mind mapping tool.
Like I said, most things correspond between the regular Wixie and this. But the one thing that is different is it sort of has a universal canvas. So if I drag this out, I can just keep dragging as far away as I want for these and the canvas will expand until I get as far as I want to be able to get.
And the fun thing is when I'm finished, if I go over to print, it will print all of these things onto one sheet of paper, or again, half sheet, it would double it up, print two per page, but it scales it to fit no matter how big it is. The same is true is if you import it into a Wixie project, it scales it to sort of fit and you're able to import a page that way. It doesn't quite have full functionality like it does if you're doing a portfolio and you want to import a mind map into your regular Wixie project, you can still import that page, but it behaves just a little bit differently because this is still there.
So that is really it for the mind mapping tool. Again, I can go to my preferences and switch theme and you'll see all of this is there for my youngers. They don't have widgets in the primary.
I can add a widget that the widgets still function, so you can still try it and work with widgets, but they don't have the ability to add them, but you'll see most everything's the same. Symbols add a little bit more simply and there's a limited number of shapes and colors that they can be, so their options are less so that they can focus more on trying to write, trying to make the connections again and showcase what they learned and again give you a window into their understanding. So that was a quick, hopefully take 10, another 10 minutes, and we hope you enjoy the mind mapping tool and can't wait to see what you and your students create.
Happy creating.
