NovaMind News

NovaMind was today named as one of the top 3 Mind Mapping applications for delivering presentations.

The original article is at http://mindmappingsoftwareblog.com/the-3-best-mind-mapping-programs-for-making-presentations/

In his review, Chuck Frey says: “The NovaMind Mac presenter mode divides your map into a series of “slides,” consisting of your entire map, each topic and its associated subtopics. Like other mind mapping software presentation modes, it “walks” you clockwise around your map and its contents, branch by branch. Where NovaMind differs is that it doesn’t make you, the presenter, click on each branch and sub-branch to expand it. It does that for you, creating a set of views with each topic and sub-topic automatically centered on the screen. This enables you to focus on presenting your remarks, and eliminates the need for you to fiddle with your map while you’re talking.

The presentation view in NovaMind also contains an elapsed time clock. Below that is a split screen; the left side displays the view of your map that your audience sees, while the right side displays the “slide” that will appear next on the screen. This gives you a preview of the next slide, so you can mentally prepare for it. Finally, below the split screen is a selector panel, which displays a timeline of all of the map views that will be part of your “slide show.” You can use it to jump to any “slide” in your presentation at any time.

In the Windows version of NovaMind, the presentation mode highlights the branches and automatically expands children branches as necessary to show the detailed information. The presentation toolbar also enables you to access the program’s libraries of icons and images, which can be dragged and dropped onto topics, edit task information and access the Suggesterator, a thesaurus-like tool that you can use with your colleagues to brainstorm additional topics and ideas while in the program’s presentation mode.”

To read the full blog post, head over to the Mind Mapping Software blog.

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In this video, you will discover new ways to make your message heard loud and clear. It will show you how to stay on topic and never get lost in your notes. You will be able to fully get to grips with the techniques for building and holding rapport with your audience and keeping them focused on the presentation, in a way that they will understand and remember.

In the last talk on presentation preparation, we talked about the presentation templates built in to NovaMind and also the 4-Mat system of presenting information in the order: Why, What, How, and What If.

We were talking about the overall structure of the presentation, and didn’t get into the fine details of delivery and wording, but along with the personality types that are being spoken to with the 4-mat system, there are four basic learning styles, and when you use the actual words that these people understand and resonate with, they will be able to see what you are getting at.

Those main learning styles are: Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic, and Auditory digital.

For the visual people, you should use words like: appear, clear, crystal, envision, focus, hazy, imagine, look, picture, reveal, see, show, view, and watch.

For the auditory people, you should use words like: all ears, harmonize, hear, heard, listen, question, resonate, rings a bell, silence, sounds, tune in/out.

For the kinesthetic people, you should use words like: catch on, feel, grasp, get a handle on, hard, harsh, sense, sensitive, solid, tap into, throw out, touch, turn around.

For the auditory digital people, you should use words like: change, chart progress, conceive, consider, criteria, decide, experience, know, learn, makes sense, motivate, perceive, plan, process, think, understand.

Using Mind Maps for your presentations makes your life really easy as a presenter, because your entire presentation is right there in front of you the whole time in a very compact form. You always have the topic at the center of the mind map, and the main points as the first level branches, so you never get lost, and always stay on topic.

It makes it easy to establish stronger eye contact and rapport with your audience because you don’t have to remember where you are up to on a huge page of written notes or shuffle your way through cue cards. Instead you have a diagram that resonates with your visual-spacial memory, so you can immediately see on the Mind Map where you are up to, and how that relates to what you have just said and what you are going to cover in the rest of your presentation.

The keywords on the branches keep you on topic without tying you to a particular way of expressing it, so you can open up and use your natural language instead of sounding as if you have read it out, as you would if you had read from traditional notes.

Because you can see at a glance how much information there is left to cover in the presentation, you can pace yourself and always finish on time without rushing, even if you do allow audience participation during the presentation.

From the audience’s point of view, they get a clearly structured presentation where they can see how it all fits together. The presentation is logical and flows so they can understand it and fit it in with their existing knowledge. They feel that you are talking directly to them because you are triggering their interest through the 4-mat structure and the learning style keywords.

Best of all, you can also print the mind map out without text on the branches and hand these maps out to your audience. They can fill in the text on the mind map during your presentation as you reveal it to them. This has a multitude of advantages for their attention and absorption of the information because they see it (great for the visual people), they hear it (auditory), they get to write it down (kinesthetic), they get to think about it and put it into their own words and extend the ideas (auditory digital). So all the learning styles are fully catered for in one place.

This is a very powerful presentation system.

So how exactly do you give a presentation from a Mind Map?

Start by stating the topic - the mind map’s title. Then go around to the innermost branches to give an introduction and tell people what to expect from the presentation.

Next, for each of the innermost branches, go through all its sub-branches to give the details for that topic.

Finally to wrap up your presentation, go around the innermost branches again and let that be your summary.

Normally you would give the presentation using the NovaMind presenter so that you can project it onto a screen and progressively reveal the branches, showing the first level branches for your introduction first, then go through the rest of your presentation delving into the detail as you go.

But if you don’t have those facilities available, you can:
* Export to PowerPoint or Keynote using the built-in mind map export tools,
* Print out the mind map to use as your notes,
* Set up the mind map on your laptop for you to see,
* Print your mind map out as a poster

The video covers these points in a bit more detail, as well as providing a number of tips which will really help you get the best result from your presentation, so watch the video now to get the full information.

 

 Flash Video: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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.

 

 Flash Video: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The NovaMind Presenter allows you to give great presentations directly from within NovaMind, and also to edit the Mind Map while you are presenting. This gives you a very powerful but flexible presentation system. This video shows you the ins and outs of using the presenter to give your presentations.

There is no setup work to go from your Mind Map to the presentation system - just click a single button. And during the presentation if you want to go in to a specific branch, or expand other branches, it’s all just a click away.

NovaMind directly supports a very clear presentation style where you can give an overview of the main topics or objectives of the presentation from the first level branches of the Mind Map, then go into more detail as you visit each of the sub-branches. Then you can go around the top level branches again to give the summary of the presentation.

There is lots more information on how to give great presentations in the presentations section of the NovaMind web site.

 

 Flash Video: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Podcast Video: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The NovaMind Presenter is a powerful presentation tool, and although it it very straightforward to use, there are some things in this video which you would not know by just playing with it. Generally it’s more fun watching a video than reading documentation - especially if you are a visual learner, so watch this NovaMind tutorial video to get up to speed quickly with the ins and outs of the Mind Map presenter.

With the NovaMind presenter, you can create great presentations directly from your Mind Maps with virtually no extra work above just creating the Mind Map.

NovaMind directly supports a very smooth presentation style where you can give an overview of the main topics or objectives of the presentation from the first level branches of the Mind Map, then go into more detail as each of the sub-branches is visited in turn. Then you can go around the top level branches in turn again to give the summary of the presentation.

There is lots more information on how to give great presentations in the presentations section of the NovaMind web site.

 

 Flash Video: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Podcast Video: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I have just put together a video based on a story from my dim distant past…about 25 years ago when I first started using Mind Maps. It shows how I made good use of mind mapping techniques to give a great presentation under … trying … circumstances.

There’s lots of information on the NovaMind web site about using Mind Maps for presentations and a good starting point is the following:

http://www.novamind.com/presentations/

where you will find this video and also lots of other information related to Mind Mapping for presentation research, preparation and delivery.

And without further ado, here is the video:

I hope you enjoy it and find it useful.

Gideon

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