Looking for some good  mind mapping and brainstorming tools to use on your Google Drive? The list below has you covered. It features a number of simple yet powerful tools to use with your students to create a wide variety of mind maps. 

Besides being fully integrated with Google Drive, these tools offer numerous helpful features ideal for classroom use. For instance, real-time collaboration is a great feature to boost students teamwork and enhance their sense of classroom community. Students can work together on joint projects, design collaborative mind maps with the ability to edit and see each others’ edits in real time.

Students can also use these tools to brainstorm ideas, visualize their learning, communicate using visual representation, summarize key ideas from a book or video, and many more. Check out educational concept mapping to learn more about the different ways you can leverage the potential of mind maps in your instruction.


1- MindMeister

MindMeister is a Google Drive mind mapping tool students can use to create visually appealing mind maps and to brainstorm ideas for complex topics.  Mind maps can include a wide variety of multimedia materials including: text, images, icons, links, and attachments. MindMeister also supports offline editing and syncing.  Mind maps can be exported to Word, PowerPoint, PDF, or as an image.


2- Lucidchart

Lucidchart is another good Google Drive mind mapping tool to try out. It is basically, “a visual collaboration tool that makes drawing diagrams fast and easy.  Work together with an unlimited number of others to create and edit diagrams in real time, with changes merged and synced instantaneously — great for team collaboration ‘.
Other interesting features provided by Lucidchart include the ability to create different visual designs (e.g., flowcharts, diagrams, process maps, Org charts, Mockups, wireframes, etc), supports all major browsers, integrates with Microsoft Office and Slack, supports numerous export options (e.g., PDF, PNG, JPG, and Microsoft Visio), and more.

3- Mindomo

Students can use Mindomo to create visual representations of complex concepts, tasks, and ideas. Mindomo allows you to embed videos and files in your mind maps thus making your creations more interactive and engaging. It also provides  different layouts to work with ( mind map, concept map, org chart, tree org chart). 
Other interesting features provided by Mindomo include offline mind mapping; map customization by adding icons, colors, styles and map outlines; Google Apps integration; playback mode to trace how a map was built; Google Drive and Dropbox backups; various import and export formats (e.g., Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard,, Schoology, etc); and more.


4- MindMup

MindMup is a Google Drive mind mapping tool that is ideal for collaborative brainstorming. MindMup supports real-time collaborative mind mapping and cloud storage. Other interesting features provided by MindMup 2.0 include the ability to attach files from Google Drive to map nodes, access to several visual themes, add images from Google Photos to map nodes, view previews in Drive, support multiple Google accounts and many more.