Seeing something is better for learning than having it described. Documents have become outdated in transferring the knowledge quickly as a picture speaks thousand words. Thus, for note-taking, words has its limitation. To make whole picture out of your study on complicated concepts, mind-maps are best solution, so does the flow chart for explaining complicated process.
Whimsical might be your one-stop app if you’re starting with mind-maps. It offers a visual workspace with best in class collaboration abilities for mind maps and flowcharts. It’s very much intuitive to use, visually appealing, requires very little effort to make your flowchart or mind map look like a professional level piece. The final chart/board is shareable, can be exported as an image file, and even Whimsical allows you to embed them in a blog or site you have.
It also offers two other set of tools namely wireframe (for designing user interface) and sticky notes. As Educoholic is more interested in learning and productivity type apps, I skip explaining these two features.
Whimsical runs on Chrome (or any modern browser) which makes it platform independent. Also the mobile version is not quite functional or in other words, small screens are not suitable for working in Whimsical. However, I tried it in my tablet (iPad), it works okay-ish in medium sized screens as on screen keyboards were blocking the views of the chart. For full fledged use, I recommend devices with minimum 13″ screen and full keyboard (like Desktop, laptop).
If you check the above video, you could see Whimsical plays nicely, feels like fluid, visually attractive and more importantly “functional”.
Pricing: Whimsical offers 4 free boards (a board may be a mind-map, flow chart, or anything), whereas $10/month offers unlimited boards. People in education (Academia) gets 4 private board and in their shared folder, they can create as many boards as they want. This means you are getting practically unlimited boards and collaborate with your team/students.
Best use cases are, student projects, research projects, team projects, complex subjects, to explain complicated concepts and relation between multiple concepts, a subject contains numerous hierarchy, lecture planning, visual boards, flow charts, etc.
Visit Whimsical.com to try for free. Highly recommended.