Vicki Davis pointed me to these articles by Brian Benzinger. I have spent some time looking over some of the online apps mentioned on Solution Watch and thought I would add my two cents on some of them. Some were already familiar to me and some were new. The one I found most intriquing was Mayomi – an online mindmapping tool. I signed up for a free account and spent some time looking around. I think the idea is great but the site is all flash and kind of wonky to me. The interface while pretty is not the most intuititve nor is the search capability.
When I tried to create a simple mind map of the colors from primary to tertiary I couldn’t figure out how to get several forks added to one keyword. I think this site will need a little more work before it is easily usable.

Another site for making diagrams on-line is Gliffy and this one seems more user friendly and fun to use. You can copy, paste, and undo. Gliffy allows you to save, publish a read-only version of your drawing, or invite people to collaborate with you. You can choose shapes, colors, connectors and fonts. It seems fairly easy to use with most of the terms and tools familiar. You can export your completed diagram as an image file in several different formats so you can print it out, insert it into another document or presentation.
Competitious has an interesting application. You can create a graphic representation of the features of different items. It would be interesting for a government class to research platforms of different candidates, or an English class to make a graphic representation of characters in a book. Students can also save “clippings” from sites they research on the web.

These were all I had time for today but there is so much more out there. In part two I will look at some of the online word processors and note-taking programs.