News and thoughts from CS Odessa, maker of the ConceptDraw product line: ConceptDraw PRO, ConceptDraw PROJECT and ConceptDraw MINDMAP.
Showing posts with label academic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label academic. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

ConceptDraw: A Boon to IT Students and Professionals

Dean Livingston is working on his Masters in Information Technology at the University of Phoenix online. Recently, Dean discovered and purchased ConceptDraw Office at the academic discount to help assist him with his course work. ConceptDraw Office consists of ConceptDraw PRO (business graphics and diagramming), ConceptDraw PROJECT (project management), and ConceptDraw MINDMAP (brainstorming, producing documents and presentations). 

Dean was a long time PC user who switched to a MacBook about 12 months ago. After switching to Macintosh, he then searched for products that could potentially do what Microsoft Project and Microsoft Visio did for him when he was a Windows user. With ConceptDraw Office, he found a suite of products that would address his academic and work needs in one bundle at a greatly discounted price.

Dean discovered ConceptDraw while doing a web search for “Visio Alternatives for Mac”. Right away he decided to download and trial the ConceptDraw suite of products. First use for Dean was ConceptDraw PRO for his “Reliable Backup” class to develop a timeline for how backup should occur as part of a class project. He sees that ConceptDraw MINDMAP will be of great assistance in helping him study for his classes and plan papers while he is working on his Master’s degree.

Dean says, “ConceptDraw Office suite is the best software package, it is amazing how powerful the products are. In the near future, I plan on viewing the instructional videos located on ConceptDraw.com to find out more about each product’s capabilities.”

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

ConceptDraw MINDMAP v7: The Importance of Importing Slides

The Presentation Exchange Solution for ConceptDraw MINDMAP adds the capability to import Microsoft® PowerPoint® slideshows and display their contents as a mind map. To see how this feature can benefit you in your everyday work, consider a few possible scenarios…


Scenario 1: Proposal Review

A major proposal to your company includes a PowerPoint slide deck. Clicking through the whole presentation will take far too much time, and in the process you can lose or obscure its meaning. With Presentation Exchange and ConceptDraw MINDMAP, you can easily extract the content and see how it fits together in a single view.

Olga: The entire management team needs to review those proposal slides before the end of the week. I just glanced at the file and there are over 50 slides! There’s no way we’ll have time for all this.

Jeff: You know, ConceptDraw MINDMAP just added this great ability to import from PowerPoint. We can just import that presentation into a mind map, and then distribute the map to our management team for review. You will save them so much time and headache; you might just get a promotion!

Olga: Brilliant, Jeff! You keep this up and you might just get that promotion.

Scenario 2: Presentation Revision

You have to give an important presentation to the Board of Directors on Friday. They picked apart the last presentation you gave, saying it was poorly organized and hard to follow. They felt you needed to do a better job of supporting your critical points. Why not try looking at your presentation in a new way: as a mind map?

Mary: I have to give the most important presentation of my life to the Board of Directors on Friday! And the last time I was in front of them, they were less then pleased.

Ignacio: I heard about how you went down in flames; it wasn’t a pretty sight. How about when you have the presentation completed, you import it into ConceptDraw MINDMAP? In a single view you can look over your slide content, see how the slides support one another, refine the story – the end result is that you’ll look much more professional.

Mary: Ignacio, you are a life saver! I never thought of doing that.

Scenario 3: Academia

The professor for your class has distributed slide presentations that contain lots of study content. Your challenge is to incorporate all the class materials to better leverage your study time. With Presentation Exchange, you can easily pull all that content into a mind map that illustrates the relationships between study topics.

Oscar: I think am going to fail the midterm tomorrow for our Supply Chain class. I’ve been studying from the PowerPoint slides the professor gave me, but it’s taking so long just to get organized. There are extensive notes on every slide! Thinking about it, I just know I am going to flunk that midterm. There’s not enough time left!

Elizabeth: The test for that class is going to be so easy. I finished studying for it yesterday.

Oscar: Yesterday?! How did you manage that?

Elizabeth: I have this cool program called ConceptDraw MINDMAP. I just imported the PowerPoint slides and all of the content appears in a mind map. It makes it super easy to organize. It brings all the notes from the slides in and everything. Then I can add more notes and even hyperlink to a web page or a supporting document. It cut my study time in half. It’s almost like magic!

Oscar: Oh man, that sounds great! I’d better go download it right away.

The Tip of the Iceberg

These are a just a few scenarios we imagined for how the Presentation Exchange Solution can make your daily life and work easier. How will YOU use it? Let us know via email to amersales@csodessa.com (Rest of World sales@csodessa.com, or follow us on Twitter @ConceptDraw.

21 day free trials of ConceptDraw MINDMAP, Presentation Exchange Solution, and all ConceptDraw products are available on ConceptDraw.com.


Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Teaching with Mind Maps So Students Learn.

Teachers have many demands on their time outside of what they get paid to do while in the classroom. Especially with the growing trend of school budget cuts, more and more demands are put on Teachers to lead after school sports and clubs, department meetings, marking homework, study groups, and student meetings.

With only so many hours in a day, the routine work of creating and updating lesson plans, developing course work, designing class presentations, and figuring out the best way to make necessary information to students available and retentive seems almost impossible. Even worse, it always seems like things could be done better, if given the right tool and more time.

By using mind maps, Teachers are able to speed up lesson planning, collaborate with other teachers—and even students, create stunning visual presentations of course content, and increase the level of information retention in their students.

ConceptDraw MINDMAP can be used effectively to organize large amounts of information, combining spatial organization and dynamic hierarchical structuring. ConceptDraw MINDMAP extends the concept of mind mapping by enabling Teachers to map more than just thoughts and ideas, with information on their computers and the internet, such as spreadsheets, documents, internet sites and images.



Many teachers find that their teaching style doesn't match the learning style of some of their students. With ConceptDraw MINDMAP you can easily prepare and present lessons that have a powerful effect on your students. As your present your syllabus, lessons, or supplementary teaching materials, students are able to easily retrieve and retain the necessary information in a way that best matches their learning style.

Teachers who have already begun adapting mind mapping to their course development are able to create powerful classroom presentations, well-thought out lesson plans, innovative handouts, effective study groups, and a central location for supplementary course materials such as websites, documents, and images. With the power of ConceptDraw MINDMAP, all the key components of teaching easily combine to become an unforgettable learning experience for their classrooms- no matter the grade level.


Mind maps may be applied to any academic task or goal while actively engaging students of all ages in creative thinking, organization, and problem solving. Mind maps are suitable for any subject or theme, and can be used in lecture halls, classrooms, online learning environments, and small groups that are geared towards groups or individual audiences.
Using mind maps in the academic environment:

  • Encourages integrated learning
  • Engages students
  • Improves memory recall
  • Generates Ideas and Inspiration
  • Assists teaching students with learning disabilities or language barriers.
    Mind maps enable students to see all classroom information in its appropriate context, with content, pictures, links, documents etc. Students immediately see the value and relevance of their contributions, helping them understand the subject more effectively.
  • Saves Time Outside the Classroom
    Teachers benefit from increased efficiency and organization in classroom or course preparation and student support.
  • Allows Teachers to set Academic Goals and Effectively Prepare Lessons
    The freedom of creativity is naturally unleashed when using ConceptDraw MINDMAP to develop lesson plans. By brainstorming lesson topics, adding in topic details as sub-topics, creating hyperlinks to website, resources, worksheets, other related lessons, and collaborating with other teachers, associating various steps needed to complete each lesson is a snap.
  • Reap the Rewards of Teacher to Student Benefits
    Once the concept of mind maps is understood, all of your students will begin to see the beneficial results. The huge difference between student performance and teacher-student engagement is beyond effective. It is rewarding for everyone.
  • Makes Structuring Lessons Simple and Straightforward
    Once a lesson plan is created, it is easy to add introductions, main lessons, summaries, follow-ups, additional resource lists, assignments, and keywords to your mind map. Collaborate with other teacher by linking to other mind maps from other lesson plans.
  • Makes for Memorable First Days
    Engaging and memorable first day of class introductions, explanations of class expectations, rules of conduct, class requirements, and more.
  • Allows Teachers to Create Stunning Presentations of Assignments

ConceptDraw MINDMAP is a powerful academic productivity software application that provides visual organization and access to information for educational environments.

Friday, March 5, 2010

Present Engaging Class Lectures with ConceptDraw MINDMAP

Step 1. From ConceptDraw MINDMAP, open the Sample Lecture Plan mind map.

Step 2. Press F5 to enter Full-Screen mode.

Step 3. Use the keyboard Arrow keys to navigate through each lecture point.



Step 4. Press Tab from your keyboard to view each object in the order they were created, from earliest to most recent.

Step 5. Press Shift+Tab from your keyboard, to view each object in the order they were created, from most recent to earliest.

Result: A professional and interactive lecture that engages students to learn.