Bubble your vocabulary!

Bubbl.us is a fantastic, free and easy to use tool to create great looking mind maps. It’s quick and straightforward for both teachers and students to use would look fab on displays. Perfect for vocabulary building! Have a play around with it, notice how you can

• hover over the bubble to edit colour/size & add links (arrows)
• move the bubbles around
• label the lines (tip, hold the link button down to drag to new bubble).

Note how you can ‘collapse’ branches so for example if you were in class you could use it as an activity to say, think of as many colours/infinitives as you can in the target language, then you could show (expand) the ones you had – students could get points for extra ones you didn’t think of!

You can also add hyperlinks to the bubbles for online use by typing in a full URL into the bubble (see Help -Editing page). To do this you need to export as HTML as this keeps the hyperlinks

One I made earlier…

Thanks to Sam for introducing me to Popplet which is a similar website that appears to combine the elements of both Bubbl.us and other tools like Wallwisher.  The main difference is that Popplet lets you add images inside your textbox which is more visual and could be more useful depending on what you’re doing. Unfortunately though, the colours are restricted to only a handful whereas they can be customised, as above, in Bubbl.us.

It has more of a mindmap feel than Wallwisher but a similar ‘post-it note’ layout – I didn’t get the idea that you could invite people to create it though I could be mistaken.

Overall I like the colours & design of Bubbl.us for mindmaps but if you need to use pictures use Popplet. Hope that helps!

Here’s a quick one I made from Popplet so you can see the difference:

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