Sketchnoting!

My experience with sketchnoting

One of my favorite education podcasts is The Cult of Pedagogy with Jennifer Gonzales. I tried my hand at Sketchnoting while listening to her podcast on Five Fantastic Ideas for Collaboration Projects.

While listening to the podcast, I felt less stressed to write down Gonzales’ ideas verbatim. Instead, I found myself focusing on key words, big ideas, and meaningful connections. I am naturally a ‘doodler’ and a visual learner so sketchnoting felt natural to me as a means to visualize and synthesize my podcast learning. I also found I was able to keep the information in my memory longer as I moved from my rough draft, to my final version above.

The difficulty I encountered while sketchnoting was layout. My rough draft was all over the place and I was running out of space. I am not sure how practical it is to re-write/draw every learning that I encounter, but that repetition is what helped me keep the information in mind.

Will sketchnoting help with intrinsic load?

Three of Mayer’s principles that help to minimize essential overload are: segmenting (or chunking), pretraining (overview beforehand), and modality (graphics and narrations vs. text and graphics alone). I do think that sketchnoting is an excellent tool to incorporate segmenting into multimedia design. As I was creating my text boxes and arrows, I was naturally chunking the different bits of information into relative sections. As for pretraining, I appreciated Doug Neill’s video on how to sketchnote without illustrations as it showed me techniques on how to make the best out of my sketchnote. I would also follow the pretraining principle by showing my students Neill’s video(s) beforehand and provide an example on the board. One way to utilize the modality principle with sketchnoting would be to upload my sketch onto Google slides or screencast while verbalizing the learning alongside the graphics. I would want to use more of an illustrative sketch though because mine has way too much text to be effective.

Will I incorporate sketchnoting in my classrooms?

Yes, yes, yes! Sketchnoting is such a great tool to incorporate into lessons and note taking. I love that individuals can be learning the same information but everyone’s sketches will be unique. I can see how this would be effective for diverse learning styles and subjects – as well as to increase motivation, retention, and recall.

Some fans of sketchnoting that I have come across:

Carrie Baughcum on why sketchnoting is effective for learning. Check out Carrie’s  website for many sketchnoting ideas and projects.

Created in collaboration by two local, inquiry-based teachers – Rebecca Bathurst-Hunt and Trevor MacKenzie. Rebecca’s site doesn’t seem to be working at the moment but Trevor’s website has many amazing sketch notes for public use.