Cool Tools Review #2 - Slatebox

For week two of my Cool Tools Reviews I looked at Slatebox.com, which is an infographic/mind mapping tool. For the second week in a row I've stumbled onto one that comes with a cost, but it is not as prohibitive as last weeks. Slatebox is free for an individual and $8/month for a classroom with up to 30 students, and the free account allows slates to be easily shared across multiple platforms. I could see this tool as being useful for presenting complex ideas or for getting students involved in mapping out ideas in a more entertaining way than just creating an outline or writing on a whiteboard.
It was easy to use, requiring perhaps five minutes of effort after the tutorial to feel pretty confident in how to do the basic functions. This ease of use would certainly improve the chances of students being able to pick it up and use it successfully in a single class period. The downside to its simplicity is that it is somewhat limited in what I could actually do with it. I kept wanting it to be Prezi, but it wasn't. This isn't necessarily a shortcoming, just something to consider before committing to a paid subscription.

This is more or less an outline of Digital Citizenship's "Nine Elements"

As you can see (I hope) in the image of the slate I created, this tool has bright colors and access to many publicly available images that can make creating an infographic fun as well as easy. And it was useful to me in visualizing the material in one of the articles I read for class this week that I felt was particularly important and I wanted to retain. I would probably only spend the money on this, however, if I was planning on having students map most of their reading assignments or do them as pre-writing activities before turning in essays. Given the current structure of my composition classes, I don't think it would be worth it for my purposes.