Navigation tips for the map above
1. Left-click and drag your mouse on any white space in the map window to move the map.
2. Click on the + or – symbols to increase or decrease the size of the map
3. Click on the rectangle with the outward pointing arrows to make the map full screen![]()
4. On the map, right-pointing arrows are hyperlinks to various resources. Click on the arrow to take you to that resource
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5. On the map, the icon with 3 bars across it indicates there is a note attached to the branch. Hover over it with the mouse to bring the note up
Background to using Mindmaps for Workshop Presentations
I was out at one of our institutions yesterday doing a short workshop on using images for learning and teaching. I stopped handing out printed workshop material some time ago and most of my support material is now online, usually on slideshare or on various wikis. I decided to revisit an old approach I sometimes used which was to deliver my presentations with a mindmap rather than the usual PowerPoint presentation. In the old days MindManager was my tool of choice but now I’ve moved over to MindMeister which has a number of advantages. The mindmap I created yesterday is online and shareable so as I went through various resources the participants could follow the links on the map on their own machines. I can also embed the map in a blog as shown above for future reference. It also has a live update feature so when I change something on the map it will display the latest version. So I don’t have to worry about various versions of outdated notes floating about. This will always be the most recent version and as this map is a work in progress I’ll be adding more content to it over time.
Process
1. Create Map over at Mindmeister.com There’s a free and premium version. You can create up to 6 maps with the free version.
2. Publish Map. There’s a Share This button on the bottom of the map and this will bring up the Map Properties Window shown below. If I wanted to share this map privately with a small group of participants I’d click on the Share tab. In this case I want to make it public to everyone. Click on the Publish Tab (1). You have a number of options on this page including which category to publish it to, in this case Education and whether to password protect it. It also generates a permanent public URL for the map (2).
3. The URL is rather long and it’s much more convenient to use a URL shortening service like bit.ly if you’re asking participants to follow along on the day. You can also supply your own ending which makes it much easier to remember.
Paste the URL in the address box on the bit.ly page and click on Shorten
Bit.ly will suggest a random combination of numbers and digits (1) but you can override this (2) and specify your own. In this case nacimages
So the shortened address is http://bit.ly/nacimages which I pasted into notepad, increased the font size and displayed this on the data projector for participants to type into their browsers.
4. After the workshop the map can be embedded into a blog like this by once again going to the Share Map button, going to the Publish tab and clicking on Embed map… You can set various options here including map size and whether you want it to have a live update feature.
Copy and post the embed code into your blog. This blog uses WordPress. I make sure I’m in the html window (1) in the editor then paste in the code.

And that’s it. This blog post probably seems a bit wordy for what is really a simple process!





Memory sticks, flash drives, usb drives, pen drives, thumb drives. All different names for the same technology – a usb storage device – a small portable device for storing data.



