Context Organizer for MindManager Webinar

Yesterday I had a chance to participate and present information about Context Organizer, in a virtual MindManager User Group Meeting at a Fortune 100 company. After presenting and being a participant in various webinars, I am still amazed at what can be accomplished without the need to be in a face to face meeting. The hour long meeting went very smoothly and when it was my turn to present I shared my computer desktop with the group and showed them how Context Organizer, a MindManager add-in can be used to summarize Word documents, web addresses, and PDF files right within a MindManager map.

I have posted about Context Organizer before and I have a couple of video demonstrations to show you the power of this tool. The MindManager User Group had selected to see a demonstration of Context Organizer in action because one of the member's of the group had been using it to plow through large documents with great success. You can think of Context Organizer as a "search engine for documents," in that it finds the most relevant keyphrases and information and succinctly summarizes it for you. If your work requires you to read through large documents or to do analyze web sites, PDF's or Word documents you really owe it to yourself to look at Context Organizer. Having the ability to access Context Organizer within MindManager is a real asset in how the information is graphically organized. For those of you who don't own a copy of MindManager 8 you will be happy to learn that Context Organizer is also a standalone product that can help you summarize documents and send the information directly to Microsoft Word.

As a postscript to this webinar, I should share with you that I used my recently purchased Acer Aspire Netbook to present from. You see when I went to use my Dell XPS laptop the virtual meeting platform did not support Internet Explorer 8, so my only option was to use my netbook. I am happy to report that my netbook worked just fine even with all of the heavy lifting. To complement my presentation, I also used Canson's Papershow product which is an ideal tool to use when you are doing a webinar. With Papershow I could share my ideas and write them down so that other could see them as if I was writing on a whiteboard. Everything I wrote down was shared and at the end of the webinar I could save it as a PDF file to email. Here is an example of what I wrote and shared with the group using Papershow. Papershow is a real natural-when doing virtual presentations or distance learning and is as easy to use as pen and paper.

Please feel free to leave me a question about mindmapping

On the Road with the Acer Aspire One

I'm on the road today and stopped into a Panera's to have some coffee and use their free wifi on my recently purchased Acer Aspire One. Many of the schools and students that I am working with have been asking me about these netbooks and I thought that it was time to invest in one so that I could try it out and use it with some of the students that I'm presently working with. When I saw the Acer Aspire One on sale at Staples for $299 dollars I knew it was time to jump in. The 2.2 pound Acer Aspire One has worked famously and while the keyboard is a little smaller than the typical laptop keyboard it is fine for some light typing. In fact I'm blogging from my Acer Aspire One right now without any difficulty. I typically have the screen zoomed in so that it is easier for me to see te text. By putting two fingers on the trackpad and gesturing towards the side of the computer you can easily zoom in which makes it a lot easier for me to see the text. For younger students with smaller hands and better eyesight the screen and keyboard should not be an obstacle.

I have installed some of my favorite applications on the Acer Aspire One, which has a a 160 Gb hard disk drive running the Intel Atom processor with 1 GB of RAM. The Acer Aspire One runs surprising well and is very responsive even running larger applications like Microsoft Office 2007 and MindManager 8. Having used the Acer Aspire One for the past couple of weeks I has lead me to believe that this could be an ideal assistive technology tool for students with writing disabilities. I have used the Acer Aspire One with a couple of students who have used Inspriation 8 in the writing process and it worked like a charm complete with text to speech. Transferring the student's work to Microsoft Word from Inspiration was very fast. I was also able to install NaturalReader the free text to speech application which worked well right within Microsoft Word. All told I have been really happy with the Acer Aspire One and look forward to seeing how other will benefit from this technology. At just 2.2 pounds and a battery life of around 2.5 hours this could be a great assistive technology tool.