Cool Tool Blog Enrty II: LucidChart

The cool tool that decided to review for this week is a web based program called LucidChart. LucidChart allows its users to collaborate and work together using many type of charts. Some of these charts include: flow charts, organizational charts, mind maps, and other kinds of charts and diagrams. Signing up to use the content on the website is free; and you can also sign in using your gmail account. Even though the website is free to use, there are some features that are only accessible to those who have a paid subscription. As you can see in the picture below, some of the features you receive for the paid description include: more space to make your charts/diagrams bigger, third party integrations, and simply more content to work with. Even though some of the features provided are locked behind a paywall, there's still plenty of resources that can be accessed with the free membership. The program overall, in my opinion, was enjoyable to use.

 Subscription Options

LucidChart is integrated with applications that include Microsoft Word, PowerPoint,  Excel, Google Docs, Google Sheets, and many others. This is pretty convenient, especially in education where some of these apps are used quite often. I found LucidChart to be very user friendly when working with it. It is also packed with many tutorials that are easy to follow. When starting out LucidChart helps start its users off by "tailoring" the user's experience to the website. Below you can see some of the categories you can choose from. If you select education there's also an option to pick between a teacher and a student. 

    Experience Categories

I decided to take the opportunity to test LucidChart by using it to create an old buddy from math class. That old friend would happened to be named "Measure Man". I learned about Measure Man when I was in 5th grade. Measure Man (which is pictured below) was created with hardly any trouble. It was a fun experience to make him again while learning how to use the website. What's great about the picture is all of the units presented are in ratio, so if you were to cut them out you could put  2 cups would fit in a pint, 2 pints would fit in a quart, and 4 quarts into the gallon. I think that this accuracy could prove to be quite beneficial for students to learn since some students learn better visually. 

Measure Man in all of his glory

I think that implementing LucidChart into classroom lessons would be a great experience for students. I think what makes LucidChart a really good website to use is how easy it is to learn how to use it. Because of how easy it is to use you wouldn't have to waste much time teaching the students how to use it. LucidChart is great for many subjects. You can make use it to make timelines for social studies, you can use it to it record data by making a table or graph for math or science, you can also use it to map out important parts of a story for language arts. I think that LucidChart is a great way to implement technology into the classroom, and I really do believe that it works well with visual learning. This is something that I will definitely remember for future use.