A visual eye on education

EducationEye presents a highly original tool for exploring curated feeds.  Its focus is on innovation in education and it organizes items visually, using colour to classify, a clever ‘paging’ arc and a form of clustering.

 

It is read-only, though you can submit suggestions.  There’s a search box, of course, and it offers an interesting but sometime patchy browsing experience.

Give it a try!

Vic

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Diagram.ly

Diagram.ly is an on-line, browser-based diagram maker.

This may appear to be another on-line diagram maker like DrawAnywhere, LucidChart or LovelyCharts.  But it has an unusual approach: Although browser based, users diagrams can be saved offline.  The Save function makes an XML file that can be saved on the user’s PC.  Then, on the next visit it can be loaded up again.  Diagrams can also be saved as SVG, PBG or JPG files.

Diagram.ly can import Visio files for editing, and that can be useful – though for users already having Visio, it’s not obvious why they would switch to the more limited capabilities of Diagram.ly.

But it does work in a browser on an iPad, and that would be useful, even for those with Visio, if they are away from the office and traveling light.

This on-line app does not support simultaneous editing or even sharing.  To share you would need to save the XML file locally and email it to your collaborators.

It doesn’t have a wide selection of symbols either (see on the right), but it is free and does not restrict its free use by number of maps (1 map for free with Lovely Charts) or number of objects on a map (60 per map with LucidChart unless you pay).

Vic

Have you checked Our Faves yet?
Subscribe to the RSS feed for news of regular
posts & follow me on Twitter for in-between
items about visual tools you never knew existed.

If you’re on Twitter and tweet about mapping topics,
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Ikonmap

I added Ikonmap to Mind-mapping.org a few months back, but only now am I blogging about it.

Ikonmap is an online, Flash-based mapper so it runs in your browser, but it is not collaborative software – there’s no multi-person editing.  You can’t even share a map for viewing online.

It is free, so I mustn’t be too critical but there’s not much that can be done to make a map look interesting.  I quickly tired of the limited control it offers to colour, shape, size, font and all the things that make up the appearance of a map. The second level is always a blue cube, the third level a yellowish sphere and so on.  It’s not even clear why they are there – the words are what matter.

Other limitations are that there is no way to attach images to the map, no undo, and the only ways to get your map out of the software are to use PrintScreen, or to print to PDF if you have suitable software.  It will export to Word, and does so as an indented list with bullets.

One benefit is that you can describe inter-node relationships, so it is half way towards being a concept mapper.  But the map is strictly limited to a tree form, so the cross links required for a concept map are not possible.

 

Vic

Have you checked Our Faves yet?
Subscribe to the RSS feed for news of regular
posts & follow me on Twitter for in-between
items about visual tools you never knew existed.

If you’re on Twitter and tweet about mapping topics,
tweet me — I’d love to know and follow you.

 

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