Laëtitia
a teacher in business management and economy at the Lycée Paul Lapie de Lunéville, France
Ambition 21 Numavenir:
- Reinforces academic perseverance using digital methods
- Meets the EU objective of limiting to 9.5% the percentage of young people without any secondary education qualification or alternative training scheme
- Supports the continuing enhancement of vocational training to provide the competencies required by today’s labor market
Background
One afternoon, Laëtitia is sitting at her desk. She is surrounded by books and a pile of documents, with her daughter playing on a game console behind her. Her computer is placed on her left, and she works on the right side. Laëtitia has to prepare a new course, but she does not know where to start. As she is familiar with MindView, she decides to create a mind map. She has done a lot of research on the web and looked up many books on the education system. She has a mass of information at her fingertips, but how should she structure them?
Structuring and organizing the course
Laëtitia needed to find a solution to present her course in a way that would be clear both to her and to her students. She had a lot of information, but did not know how to organize it. She decided to create a mind map to display the data she had found, and then to structure it. She started by creating the root of the mind map. Then, as her reading had highlighted key areas, she created a main branch for each of them. Representing the ideas in this format already made the subject less confusing and she was then able to group the rest of the ideas by theme.
Using a mind map in this way not only helped her to structure the mass of information she had on the topic, but it also provided a logical arrangement for her presentation. She now knows what she is going to talk about, what points she is going to raise, when, and in what order.
A shared asset (teacher/students)
In the absence of a mind map, Laëtitia would have had to create her course in the classical way, and it would have been less compelling. And because MindView lets her keep all the data on one page, it also acts as a memory aid. Furthermore, presenting the MindView map helped her feel more confident while facing her public. Seeing the mind map in front of her let her visualize each of the sections to be developed, and let the students follow the logic of her thinking.
Tips
Laëtitia recommends the use of mind mapping to anyone who needs their data to be presented instantly in a clear and structured overview. She is comfortable with MindView and finds it interesting because it can give her a quick, clear and concise overview whenever she has a large quantity of data or resources to manage.
That’s why she often uses it to:
- prepare a course lecture
- create a course summary
- get the students to create an overview of a topic
- implement a project
- work out her global teaching strategy
- prepare for inspection
« In fact, the mind map has allowed me to inspect all the information at my disposal. Once I had my 3 main branches in place, in other words the 3 main themes I wanted to talk about, I examined all the information I needed to convey, and was able to structure it in my 3 main branches. »
« My objective was to make some sense of all this data… which I had to do because it wasn’t at all clear in my head to start with. »
