Transcript

WOMAN

In this screencast, you will learn how to use FreeMind. I will go through three examples in which an arguments map is created from a short piece of argumentative text. On the screen, you'll see the text itself opened in Notepad, and alongside it, the FreeMind editor. For the text editor, I will use Notepad, but any other editor or word processor will do.

So let's get started and open the first text for which I will create an argument map. Next, we create an empty map in FreeMind. Click on File in the menu bar, and then select the option New. You will see a new map appear with a grey oval in the middle. This is where you can enter the main claim.

Click on the text in the oval, and type in the main claim from the notepad text. When you are finished, hit the Return key. Now, we're going to introduce a supporting claim. Right click on the main claim, and select New Child Node, then select the Child Node, and type support and add the Green Tech icon from the icon bar on the left-hand side.

Next, select the node you've just created, and again choose the option New Child Node. Type in the text of the supporting claim. I'm going to add two further support relations and the corresponding claims. Rather than create the support relation for the nodes from scratch, I'll now copy the one we created previously and reuse it.

To do this, I click on the previously created support relation and then select Copy Single on the menu. Next, I go to the node under which I want to attach the support relation, and select Paste. I can then repeat the paste action to add the second support relation.

Under each relation, I also need to create a node for the corresponding claims. Rather than type the text for the nodes, this time I use a quicker method. I copy and paste it from the notepad text, copy the text, select the relation under which the text needs to be placed, and then choose Paste on the menu. The resulting nodes are, however, not laid out very nicely.

To change the formatting, right click on a node, and select Edit Long Node. You can then introduce some carriage returns. We follow the same procedure for the other node. Now that I'm done, I finish by saving my map. I choose Save As on the File menu. That allows me to enter a name for the file and choose a folder.

I can also export the map to an image file or, for example, a PDF document.