iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

When I first started teaching the skill of visual note-taking, I broke down the applications of sketchnoting into three categories: learning, solving problems, and sharing ideas.

I still like those three categories and feel like that breakdown is all-encompassing, but lately I’ve been shifting the way that I phrase the last one.

I’ve been moving from “sharing ideas” to “telling stories”.

Once a month, Rayna Freedman’s fifth-graders present their genius hour projects. They get to explore anything that interests them and present what they’ve learned to the class in whatever way they want. Freedman likes genius hour projects because students often get more excited about researching and sharing their knowledge about a topic that interests them. But she was never sure what the other kids were getting out of listening to the presentations.

One day she noticed a student in the back of the class drawing during the presentations. She went over, ready to reprimand him for not paying attention, but instead asked him what he was doing. He explained he doodles what his classmate is talking about to help him remember later. A lightbulb went on for Freedman.

“I thought that if the kids had a way to show me what they were learning, I would know what other kids were getting out of it,” Freedman said during a presentation on how she uses sketchnoting in her classroom at the Building Learning Communities conference.

We are revisiting the topic of sketchnoting with an updated list of some of the best iPad apps you can use to create visually attractive sketchnotes. As we have argued elsewhere, Sketchnoting is the art of visual recording in which the sketchnoter draws on a multimodal set of tools to communicate their ideas. Unlike traditional note taking, sketchnoting is a primarily visual medium in that it foregrounds the visual element and  highlights connections and hierarchies. Sketchnoting involves the blending of words with drawings, shapes, diagrams, and graphic organizers ( e.g arrows, pointers, bullet points..etc).