EduTechie.com

11 Jun, 2007

Sprouts – Educational Review

Posted by: Jeff VanDrimmelen In: Student Tools| Teacher Tools

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I came across an interesting new start-up recently called Sprouts. From their website:

Sprouts will be a free online service that lets you create graphical trees of related items using a visual designer. You can create your own projects, or publish your trees to share with others.

The program is brand new and still has some bugs to work out, but it looks really promising. Although the program is in pre-alpha you can e-mail Greg, the designer and he will create an account for you. He is also very open to suggestions and even implemented an embed option at my request. You can see a small sprout I made up below.

I really like some of the features. After you create a node, you can add nodes manually, or via RSS and Search.

sprouts-add-menu

You can then edit each node individually and add pictures, tooltips and even notes about the node.

sprouts-properties

I could see this being very useful to teachers and students for a creative representation of an idea they are working on. How could you use this?

2 Responses to "Sprouts – Educational Review"

1 | Greg

June 11th, 2007 at 2:05 pm

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Thanks for the write-up Jeff! You make -even- me look good. Let me know when you think up something else and we’ll see about getting it in. Because Sprouts is written in Adobe Flex, adding in new functionality is pretty much a joy. But like I told ya, I think you’re going to like the new thing I working on – it’s in Apollo Air and might be right up your alley…

2 | Jacques Morin

June 25th, 2007 at 8:16 am

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Jeff

This kind of technology has been around for sometime – this web site has been using similar technology to produce fascinating word maps – have a look – http://www.visualthesaurus.com/

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About Me

Jeff - I am an Instructional Technologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I love Google, Mac's, and Web Technologies that help us better reach, teach, connect, and prepare students to solve the world's greatest problems.