When organizing ideas and thoughts, a concept map may come to mind. Well, concept maps are also the best platform to create an outline for essays, assignments, or for making review sheets for exams. No wonder it is very popular among students nowadays. Of course, you can create a concept map on paper, but a concept mapping app would make a huge difference. If you are looking for a step-by-step process and free concept map makers to get you started, then read through.

1. Freeplane Ios
2. Freeplane Latex
3. Freeplane Mac
4. Freeplane Tutorial

Best Concept Map Makers

Freeplane is a mind-mapping software that enables the quick creation of detailed plans and idea-layouts. The software provides customization and formats for you to begin working immediately. Freeplane is a tool for creating and designing mind maps that you can use to put your ideas in order and construct complex schema in a simple manner.

GitMind

Score: ★ ★ ★ ★ ✰

Freeplane Ios

Pricing: Free

GitMind is an innovative concept map maker and is also one of the best among free graphic organizers that you can use online. It contains quite a number of customization options providing tools for color, font, shape formatting. With its relational line feature, you will be able to cross-link ideas to each other. Aside from that, you can use its summary function to label branches to better depict relationships between ideas. Furthermore, GitMind offers real-time collaboration services allowing you and your team to view and edit the same content as if you were in the same room.

XMind

Score: ★ ★ ★ ★ ✰

Pricing: Free; $39.99 / 6 Months

Another software to create a concept map with great ease is XMind. This is a free concept map creator featuring share support that enables users to export concept maps to .xmind and image files. In addition, all your data can be embedded in presentation apps including Microsoft PowerPoint, Keynote and Google Slides. When it comes to accessibility, this app is great because you can sync data across different mobile and computer platforms.

Mind42

Score: ★ ★ ★ ✰ ✰

Pricing: Free

Create concept maps and collaborate on the web with the help of Mind42. This is practical if you want to avoid downloading any extra software. This tool is equipped with useful viewing functions such as zoom, birdview and collapsing to keep an overview of your content. It is also worth mentioning that this tool allows you to import and export concept maps from and to other concept map makers free of charge.

WiseMapping

Score: ★ ★ ★ ✰ ✰

Pricing: Free

WiseMapping can also be used for creating and editing concept maps and is recommended for both individuals and businesses. Using this tool, you can share your concept maps publicly by embedding them to any website without plugins. One of its more interesting features is it uses HTML5.0 and Scalable Vector Graphics(SVG) technology, which are responsible for clean and smooth graphics animation.

Freeplane

Score: ★ ★ ✰ ✰ ✰

Pricing: Free

Freeplane offers an intuitive way of organizing content to give you an edge. This software automatically arranges the position of the nodes, paragraphs, and headings of your concept map. What’s more, you can set due dates and reminders to increase your productivity and finish tasks right on time using its Task Calendaring & Reminders feature.

Goconqr

Score: ★ ★ ★ ✰ ✰

Pricing: Free; $2.75 / Month

Goconqr provides a dynamic learning culture for users to understand and develop key concepts. Whether you are a student or a teacher it will help you boost your visual learning process using its online study tools like mind or concept map creator, quizzes, flashcards, and a lot more. Also, if you need ideas for conceptualizing lessons, it’s best to refer to thinking maps and visualize it using Goconqr. Another highlight of Goconqr is it offers easy access to its active community to aid your studies by gathering different study methods from your study buddies.

TheBrain

Score: ★ ★ ✰ ✰ ✰

Pricing: 30-day Free trial; $219 / Year

Nothing beats the convenience of viewing and editing concept maps across all your devices and that’s what’s great about TheBrain. This tool comes with a search bar that enables you to quickly find the information from your concept map. With its interactive user-interface, recording and organizing your thoughts becomes much easier and quicker.

Freeplane Latex

Novamind

Score: ★ ★ ★ ✰ ✰

Pricing: Free; $7 / Month

Novamind is another concept map maker which hosts a wide variety of themes. Whether you want your map to look professional, organic, or playful, the tool can make it happen. On top of that, you can effortlessly present maps with its impromptu presentation mode. All you need to do is select the path through your map on which topic to discuss from beginning to end and then it will automatically expand and zoom in on the topics to be discussed in order.

Canva

Score: ★ ★ ★ ★ ✰

Pricing: Free; $12.95 / Month

Think you’ve seen it all? Canva isn’t your run of the mill concept map creator as this platform combines the benefits of idea organization and a quality graphic design editor. It is loaded mostly with tools for photo editing, offering a vast library of images, fonts, icons, figures, and templates. It’s fun and exciting to create concept maps using Canva because it inspires you to be creative with all the interesting features it offers.

Conclusion

Concept maps are indeed helpful for studies as they enable you to freely layout your thoughts visually. Some of these can be used for free, while some require a subscription to access premium features. Yet in case you’re looking for a totally free app with full access to all its great tools, why not give GitMind a shot.

A previous Fedora Magazine article covered tracking your time and tasks. Another introduced some mind mapping tools. There you learned that mind mapping is a visual technique for structuring and organizing thoughts and ideas. This article covers another mind mapping app you can use in Fedora: Freeplane.

Freeplane is a free and open source software application that supports thinking, sharing information and getting things done. Freeplane runs on any operating system that has a current version of Java installed.

Installing Freeplane

Freeplane is not currently packaged in the Fedora repositories, so you will need to install it from the project’s website.

1. Go to the project’s Sourceforge site and click Download to download the file
2. Open a terminal and extract the file (note that the version you download may be different): unzip freeplane_bin-1.8.5.zip
3. Move the extracted contents to the /opt directory: sudo mv freeplane-1.8.5 /opt/freeplane

The configuration file is located in: ~/.config/freeplane. You can launch Freeplane by running /opt/freeplane/freeplane.sh from a terminal, but if you want to launch it from the desktop environment you can create a desktop file.

Open your favorite text editor and save the contents below to ~/.local/share/applications/freeplane.desktop.

Next, update the desktop file database with update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications

Now you can launch Freeplane from your desktop environment.

Using Freeplane

At its first startup, Freeplane’s main window includes an example mind map with links to documentation about all the different things you can do with Freeplane.

Start your First Mind Mapping

You have a choice of templates when you create a new mind map. The standard template works for most cases. Start typing the idea and your text will replace the center text.

Press the Insert key to add a branch (or node) off the center with a blank field where you can fill in something associated with the idea. Press Insert again to add another node connected to the first one.

Press Enter on a node to add a node parallel to that one.

All keyboard shortcuts are in the Freeplane documentation.

Freeplane Mac

Freeplane Plug-ins

Plug-ins can be used to extend and customize the use of the app. Two important ones are:

Freeplane Tutorial

1. Freeplane GTD+: A generic task management add-on, with a special focus in supporting the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology
2. Study Planner: helps organize learning

To install a new add-on to Freeplane, find the add-on you want on the Freemind add-ons directory.

• Download the desired add-on
• In Freeplane, select Tools > Add-ons
• Click the Search button
• Find and select the file you just downloaded
• Click Install
• Depending on the add-on, you may have additional questions to answer
• Restart Freeplane to use the new add-on

Integrating mind mapping in your everyday life

Mind mapping is a very powerful method that can be of great assistance in many aspects of life.

• Learning Linux or any certification
• Learning a computer language
• Learning a human language
• Even earning a degree

Whatever the objective this will always help to keep the ideas together and organized.

Personally I’m earning a few Linux Professional Institute certifications. The image below shows a mind map I am creating as I go through the systemd materials.

Conclusion

Now you have a start on how you can use Freeplane. Freeplane gives you all the tools you’ll need to create great, vibrant, and useful mind maps. Share how you use it in the comments.