Mural
Visual collaboration platform for remote brainstorming and design thinking
What it does
Overview
Who it's for
Best suited for
- Running design thinking workshops where students work through problem-solving frameworks collaboratively.
- Facilitating brainstorming sessions for creative projects, essays, or research topics across distributed teams.
- Creating visual mind maps and concept maps as a class to organize curriculum content and connections.
- Conducting retrospectives and feedback sessions where students reflect on learning and provide peer input in a structured format.
Key features
What you get
- Provides unlimited digital canvas space with sticky notes, shapes, images, and drawing tools for capturing and organizing ideas.
- Offers pre-built templates for design sprints, retrospectives, brainstorming sessions, and educational frameworks to jumpstart activities.
- Enables real-time collaboration with live cursors, reactions, and voting features that allow multiple users to work simultaneously.
- Includes presentation mode and interactive facilitation tools that help educators guide discussions and highlight key insights during sessions.
Pros & cons
The honest take
What works well
- Intuitive visual interface that requires minimal training and appeals to diverse learning styles and ages.
- Extensive template library specifically designed for educational activities like design sprints, brainstorms, and retrospectives.
- Supports both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, accommodating different schedules and time zones in remote learning.
- Excellent for inclusive participation where quieter students can contribute ideas without pressure of speaking up in real-time.
Worth knowing
- Free tier has limitations on workspace size and features, potentially requiring paid upgrade for larger classes or advanced functionality.
- Learning curve exists for educators unfamiliar with visual collaboration tools, requiring time to design effective activities and templates.
- Can become cluttered or overwhelming if not properly facilitated, especially with large groups contributing simultaneously to the same canvas.
Pricing
What it costs
Mural offers a free tier for small teams and paid plans for organizations requiring advanced features and higher user capacity.
Limited workspaces and templates for small teams or individual use
Unlimited workspaces, advanced templates, and enhanced collaboration features
Full-featured solution with dedicated support, SSO, and custom integrations
Best use cases
When to reach for it
Design Thinking Workshop
Guide students through a structured design thinking process using Mural's templates to empathize, define problems, ideate solutions, and prototype. The visual canvas allows students to see all ideas, build on others' contributions, and vote on the best concepts together.
Collaborative Concept Mapping
Have students create visual mind maps of curriculum content by adding connected ideas, definitions, and relationships on a shared canvas. This helps visualize connections between concepts and supports different learning modalities while allowing peer input and feedback.
Remote Group Project Planning
Use Mural for teams to plan projects by organizing tasks, timelines, and responsibilities visually. Students can arrange sticky notes, create swim lanes, assign ownership, and maintain a living project document that evolves as work progresses.
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Official links