While mind maps have been around a while, I’ve really not used them. It’s a concept that works really well in software and less so on a whiteboard, I think, as changes are easier when you are using bits.

I spent the day at Boy Scout Leader training (I’m District Chairman for Orange District, NC). We had a goal-setting exercise at the end. I tried the mindmap software MindNode on my iPad ($5.99 iPad, free from the MacOS app store). It’s a simple piece of software, but I think that this might be pretty useful for this sort of brainstorming activity. One thing is that this is just the sort of exercise at which a tablet computer excels. Orange District committee members spent about 20 minutes brainstorming about what we can do to improve the program in our district and meet the requirements set for us by Council and National; we came up with this. The point of this post is not to talk about Boy Scout district planning, but to really use that to talk about mind maps and the MindNode tool. Its simplicity is a virtue, I think. It does say that it supports VGA output from the iPad, which should be very useful, though I’ve not tried it yet.

I’m intrigued by the software, and now that I’ve got this tool, I think I’ll try this concept in some other settings.