Mindtools

A significant topic of this blog will be about new mindtools together with new ways to use them.

MindTools was coined by David H. Jonassen. A MindTool is any tool that represents thinking abstractly and gives a high degree of control to the user to, in effect, reason by manipulation of the representation. A good example is freemind, an open source mindmapping tool. Truly useful mindtools support shared thinking. Wikipedia and debateGraph are good examples.

A MindTool supports some or all of the following learning and professional activities: meaningful learning, knowledge construction, reflective thinking, cognitive partnership, and scaffold thinking.

Some of the other mind tools mentioned in (Jonassen, D. H. (1999). Computers as Mindtools for Schools: Engaging Critical Thinking, 2e. Prentice Hall) are mindmaps, databases, spreadsheets, and simulation creation tools.

Please share some of the tools you are using to think bigger.