The Mind-Mapping software, Concept Draw, has been reviewed on the site before, but a new update has been launched and as our school was looking at evaluating different software to help with our curriculum planning, I agreed to trial it.

When you download and open the software, you are taken aback with just how complicated it appears. However, a ‘bubble sheet’ of options pops up to select from, which is quite user- friendly. The options include a Getting Started Tutorial; Start to MindMap; Create MindMap from template; Begin Brainstorming; Outline new idea; Open last edited mind map and Explore Existing MindMap. Being a ‘manual-reader’ person, I selected the Tutorial, to see if it would guide me through the icons on the screen (of which there are a plethora!)

When clicking on the tutorial, you are taken to quite a daunting
Windows style Help page, with 8 different lessons to choose from. From
the titles on the help pages, I felt that this is definitely geared
more towards the business market, rather than the education sector. The
screen shots are useful, and do go some way to explain how to move
forward, but maybe if they were labelled as to what each individual
icon does, it would be much easier to follow.

After a while, I opted to leave the tutorial and just ‘played’ with
the various tools that were presented in the typical windows drop-down
menu style.

The brainstorming facility is useful when getting ideas down, as it
allows the ideas to flow, without having to think of where to put the
floating ideas. Once you finish brainstorming, just click on the
‘organise ideas’ icon, and they are exported to the mindmap, although
only as floating ideas. Once you create extra ideas linked to the main
theme, these can then just be dragged and dropped to the correct place
on the map. The links are then made for you, including the creation of
subtopics.

When inserting clipart, it has a limited range of business icons,
but it does take the images from your ‘My Pictures’ folder to use –
ideal if you are using a school machine, but not so good if you don’t
want to share your holiday snaps with the rest of the staff!

I like the idea of being able to export the file to Powerpoint, Word
and PDF, so that all staff could have access to the map, although it
did lose some of the formatting in the transfer, but this may have been
something that I did wrong, rather than the program itself.

Being able to add notes separately, meant that the map itself didn’t become over-cluttered, which was a useful feature.

Also, because this was used to try out curriculum development,
hyperlinks could be added straight onto the map, which made it easier
than searching through the notes.

All in all, Concept Draw is a very professional MindMapping package,
which offers possibly far more than one could ever hope for (or indeed
use) in the Primary Sector. It definitely has a place for Staff use,
although many colleagues who are just coming around to the idea of
using computers for planning may be a little disheartened by the
complexity of the program.