effective using Mind Mapping

Lesson Plans are more effective using Mind Mapping

Classroom lessons, projects, even an entire curriculum: NovaMind eats them all for breakfast.

NovaMind’s main function is to easily organize anything – the order of events for lessons, the equipment required, lesson objectives. In some cases, the mind maps created are used as a lesson template and this saves hours of preparation.

A mind map at the curriculum design level is a powerful tool for a teacher. It can zero in on the essential tasks, plan the year’s requirements and determine your exact requirements in advance. This can save hours of planning yet make your lessons more powerful than ever before!

Lesson plans made using Mind Mapping techniques are clear and easy to follow. You can easily see that all the required targets are being achieved. Whether you are teaching at elementary or post-university level, lesson plans created using NovaMind make your life easier and your lessons more effective

Producing Handouts using Mind Mapping

With the clearly organized information you gathered as a result of lesson planning, you already have the information in a clear format for the next task: producing handouts. Students respond more positively to lessons with an interactive, audio-visual content rather than one that is all talk, no action…

NovaMind makes this easy – with a mouse click you can print any mind map without the text. This allows the students to increase their own learning by applying their own visual, auditory and creative strengths during and after class.

This also allows them to easily extend the Mind Map in a new way to record additional thoughts or information they think is important. This makes the lesson suit their individual learning style as well as giving them the opportunity to record the topic titles in words that mean more to them. The result is an increase in both learning and memorization.

ind Mapping allows you to give excellent presentations

Presenting with NovaMind is a joy. Start with your stunning NovaMind document including color and images and your presentation flows naturally and seamlessly. For additional interaction, start with an outline and get feedback from your audience as to how to build the mind map as you go.

As a teacher, your mind maps become powerful when you can put your new information in a context. So, for example, including hyperlinks to other Mind Maps, web pages or files, will allow you to draw in information from multiple sources in order to create that context.

Color, visual organization and background images will make the entire presentation even more memorable. You can also use the movie-like zooms built into NovaMind Presenter to impress student audiences who are beginning to demand a more modern look.

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Underserved populations
NovaMind Mind Mapping software for remote or demanding students

Imagine a teacher with a student who has a learning disability. Or imagine the student who is home-schooled or lives in a remote town where access to newer learning methods is unavailable.

Both these groups can benefit enormously from learning strategies that mind maps can support.

In the first situation, mind maps use so many different cognitive learning aspects, that they are an excellent tool for building and maintaining the interests of students who may otherwise not be very engaged.

In the second situation, mind maps can resolve difficulties that students from remote towns might feel, either because they are culturally different or an inconvenient geographic problem. Teachers using NovaMind solve this problem because mind maps are a visual communication and culturally neutral.

In other words, they encourage communication across groups because they use imagery, and not only words, bypassing the difficulties that come about when groups must communicate but can’t to each other but can’t because the language is not the same or they are separated by distance.

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Collaboration
Bringing it all together

Mind Mapping helps you engage different groups in producing the required outcomes, and involves them in the understanding of the information.

This allows you to combine ideas and see the bigger picture. Everyone can see how all the parts fit together and you are able to come up with better and more complete solutions.

This means that you can focus your efforts better, and get the buy-in of everyone. Your efforts as a group are more focussed, and with everyone pulling together in the same direction, your accomplishments are multiplied.

NovaMind makes an immediate and powerful improvement in your work – here’s what a new user has to say about the first few times he used it:

"The relationships become clear in my mind and the thoughts get untangled"

I spoke to the student bodies of two schools this week. The first talk I prepped my usual way…outlined notes in Word. Took most of an evening and I was tied to a 12 page annotated outline. The second in NovaMind took about 30 minutes to prep, and I did a 40 minute teaching from one sheet of paper and did not miss a bit of it (and did not run too long down the rabbit trails because I could see how much more I needed to talk about.)

The spatial/visual properties of NovaMind made me a better speaker, and I don’t even know how to use all the features yet.

Scott Wilcher
Virginia, United State