GoSoapBox is a system that allows students to respond electronically, in real-time or asynchronously, either spontaneously or to a wide variety of prompts such as quizzes or polls. It is entirely web-based (no app required), but each student needs a connected device (BYOD or 1:1).
Mind-mapping is a great process, and this publisher offers several of the best tools I've come across. But one downside: unless you can find someone else to pay for it, it's $40 (gulp).
MURAL is a large, shared canvas for mapping content and ideas of all kinds. It's like a giant white board that can be zoomed in and out to see the big picture as well as the details. Electronic "sticky notes" hold individual ideas that can be rearranged, organized, and related to one another. You can add many kinds of web content, and team members can add ideas and content and then build on each other's by finding relationships and patterns. It has a number of educational applications, in science and other subjects:
- Realistic labs, where lab groups define the hypothesis and methodology, and agree on the interpretation and presentation of results.
- Any kind of group projects where students work together toward a common end product.
_Description:_ Tracker allows you to extract motion data from a video, so by simply taking a video of a classroom demonstration, students can clearly visualize concepts like acceleration, parabolic motion, periodic/pendulum motion, and momentum conversation in collisions. Tacker makes it much easier to communicate counter-intuitive concepts by enabling students to slow down and quantify the motion of objects in videos.
_Examples of uses:_
* Demonstrating constant acceleration due to gravity
* Confirming conservation of momentum in elastic collisions
* Showing that projectile motion is parabolic