Coggle is a free mind mapping tool that I started using a couple of years ago. Coggle is a collaborative mind-mapping service. This week Coggle received some enhancements to bolster the collaborative aspects of the service.

This week Coggle added more space for longer notes, messages, and comments. The messages feature works much like the chat feature found in Google Documents. Through the messages feature students and teachers can communicate on the same page on which they’re developing their mindmaps.

Learn more about Coggle in the video embedded below.

Applications for Education

Creating mind maps is one of my favorite ways to organize ideas and information. I’ve often had my students create mind maps as an exercise in making visual connections between important concepts, events, and people in a unit of study. Coggle’s new messaging and commenting features should help students work together to create better mind maps of concepts they are studying.

To create a Coggle mind map just sign-in with your Google account and click the “+” icon to start your mind map. After entering the main idea of your mind map you can add branches by clicking the “+” icons that appear next to everything you type. To re-arrange elements just click on them and drag them around your screen. You can invite others to view and edit your mind maps. You can also just invite others to view by sending them an email through Coggle. All Coggle mind maps can be downloaded as PDFs or PNG image files. You can also save and organize Coggle mind map files in your Google Drive account.