An amazing tool for brainstorming and collaboration!

Organize your ideas easily with Bubbl.us!

Brainstorming and mind mapping ideas are vital part of education process these days, especially in language learning. I would choose to use a collaboration tool Bubbl.us, as it offers several and easy-to-catch ways of mind mapping for my students while for example, coming up with ideas for writing essays, analysing and sharing thoughts for project assignments. This tool has unique features like, note taking with pictures, links, and formatting that can help students to make their ideas in order. Bubbl.us may help to develop better critical thinking and promotes smooth organization. Also, Stair (2013) suggested that Bubbl.us as a useful online application that seamlessly enhances student-student and student-tutor engagement.

Here is the link you can use for this tool: https://bubbl.us/en

I can see variety of benefits of this tool for the teachers of all disciplines

• Teachers can show the tasks in big visuals and mind maps which usually help students to remember easily. To the best of my knowledge, this method is more interesting than showing simple notes in this technologically advanced era. It is obvious that most people pay more attention when the information is presented in visual charts and mind maps and remember better.
• This tool promotes collaborative learning in the classroom which in turn strengthens stronger rapport among teacher and students and within the small teams that are working together as well.

Bubbl.us offers great range of charts as you may see in the following photos. For instance, I would use Outline Right Align chart for brainstorming advantages and disadvantages essay. One group could search and discuss merits of a particular issue by using Outline Right Align form to tailor their ideas accurately and by implementing technology to the classroom while another group does the same for demerits of the same matter and in the end, both groups may share and discuss their opinions. I believe, students will be more engaged when they align the technology to the given task. Abd Karim et al., (2020) suggested that studied effectiveness of this tool and found out that Bubbl.us helped to improve learners' writing skills. 

Limitations of Bubbl.us could be the time and the resources. It can be time-consuming process to enroll students to brainstorm the task with Bubbl.us until they get quite familiarized with it. Also, it can be difficult to access to Bubbl.us in low resource contexts with poor Internet connection and lack of  computers and mobile phones.

So, my dear technophile friends, let's make our lessons more fun and interesting with Bubbl.us!

Here is the link for the chart for an SLA lesson that I created. You may have a look!

https://go.bubbl.us/e889cb/27ad?/Organization-Chart

Photo credits: Pixabay

References

Abd Karim, R., Tahir, M. H. M., Adnan, A. H. M., Idris, N., Ismail, I., & Abu, A. G. (2020). Bubbl. us: A digital mind-mapping tool to promote a mobile-based technology approach in writing courses. In Emerging Perspectives and Trends in Innovative Technology for Quality Education 4.0 (pp. 231-235). Routledge.

Stair, N. (2013). Bubbl. us–Web 2.0 Mind Mapping. Compass: Journal of Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 4(8).