Edistorm
Edistorm is a Web 2.0 tool for brainstorming. Compiled of the name Edison, from Thomas Edison, and the word brainstorming, Edistorm is an interesting tool for collaborating over distances or just organizing your thoughts. The tool is very intuitive and one can start a storm for private, public or solo use. If you choose solo, the application has several bots designed to help you with your brainstorm. Take your main idea, place it in the center of the screen and the bots will generate suggestions for the storm.
I used the tool as a graphic organizer/brainstormer to help put together thoughts for my digital art curriculum. I first put several sticky notes onto the screen displaying concepts such as software I will be using and lesson ideas I may want to do, and the bots did the rest. When placing the word “Bryce” at the center of the screen, suggestions were made from Bryce Canyon National Park to Daz 3D (Daz is the current publisher of the software Bryce 3D). Suggestions, which do not fit the topic, can be tagged with thumbs down to make room for more suggestions.
Where the tool becomes very interesting is when you pull in real-time collaborators to help with the storm. All one needs to do is input the email addresses of the people you want to help collaborate and then along with the bots you would have real people, whom you know and know your project join the fun.
When the storm is finished it can be published either through html or pdf format. Although pdf is an available choice for export I ended up having to take a screen shot of my final storm, because during the exportation to pdf some of the formatting and resulting portions of the image changed. I would hope they fix this issue with later updates to this fascinating software.
http://www.edistorm.com/
