NovaMind News

A key part of any presentation is the preparation, and this video gives you some important tips about preparing your presentation using NovaMind.

In NovaMind Pro and Platinum, there are two Mind Map templates which you can use for creating your presentations, and these are introduced in the video, but the majority of the video shows you how to put together your presentation without using a template, based on the research work of David Kolb and Bernice McCarthy.

These studies on learning styles and how people react to the information they are presented with give a solid basis for building presentations that hook the interest of your entire audience.

You have probably heard about the concept that different people learn in different ways, and David Kolb did some interesting research which concluded that there are four main ways that people learn new things: By experiencing something for themselves, by observing something and reflecting on what they have learned, by thinking about what they have heard, or by doing things for themselves.

It is difficult to appeal to all these different learning types in a single speech, but Bernice McCarthy put together what is called the 4-mat system, which is designed to hook the interest and attention of all the different learning types.

The 4-mat system of presentation is divided into four sections, which are: Why, What, How, and What If.

For the “Why?” people, if you don’t hook them right up front with a good reason for them to listen to you, you will not be able to get them to listen to the rest of the talk. You really want to hook these people because they are the ones who will take your message on board as part of themselves and spread it to other people.

If the “What?” people don’t get the information about what is going to be covered in the presentation near the start of the presentation, they will thing that there is no substance to what you are talking about. You want these people to take it all in because these are the people who will be able to explain in logical detail exactly what the idea is, and can then take it forward and implement it, sticking to the true concepts no matter what human or other obstacles are in the way.

The “How?” people will take away the information you gave them and try it for themselves. Some of them will be able to visualize themselves doing the things you were talking about, but in many cases, they need to actually do it themselves. When these people know that it works by experiencing it for themselves, they will build strategies and designs to implement the ideas widely, and will inspire others to follow them.

And lastly, the “What If?” people will be thinking up questions right from the moment you start your talk, and you have to know how to cater for their needs in your presentation. This is discussed in the video These people love doing things with what they have learned, and will get in there and learn by trial and error, and when they have “got it”, they will share their vision of the possibilities this opens up, and will encourage and cajole other people to become involved.

The video shows you how to use Mind Maps to implement these strategies for both a short talk and a longer presentation. Mind Mapping gives you a lot of advantages over more traditional presentation methods, both in the structuring and preparation of the presentation, and by using Mind Maps during presentation delivery.

There will be a follow up video about presentation delivery shortly.

So watch the video now to get the full information, and if you don’t already have NovaMind, you can download it by clicking on the download button on the top of any page of the main NovaMind web site.

 

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Tags: Bernice McCarthy, David Kolb, Mind Mapping, presentation preparation, presentations, presenter

This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 11:05 am and is filed under Announcements, Mind Mapping Articles, Mind Mapping for Presentations, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.