I don’t need to bother selling teachers on the benefits of mind mapping programs, but I do want to bring your attention to a pretty cool new one that can easily be embedded into the content area of a D2L page. Coggle.it If you add it as a link in your D2L course content area, it acts as if is a seamless part of the course, not an external tool.
Students can be directed to Coggle without leaving the vLE. Using a Google Apps account (or their own Google account) students can use automatic single sign-on and then create their own mind maps, share the link with their teacher, or download and reupload them to the dropbox. If a teacher wanted to get really fancy, they could create a tool link directly to the Coggle content page so the students could navigate to it directly.