Teaching Sketchnoting: A Four Part Series 4/4

My first experience teaching sketchnoting was to this fabulous group of fourth graders at Beaver Acres Elementary in Mrs. Hoxie's class. The very next day I was in four 8th grade humanities classes. The student examples are from multiple classes aged upper elementary to 8th grade. 

My learning and growth...

We are a 1:1 school district from grade 4-12 with chromebooks, we have provided carts of iPads which are hard to come by at the elementary level they are passing those out to anyone and everyone, but at the secondary level we find that many of the iPads are going unused. After attempting to try and teach the intro lesson on chromebooks and always struggling with the hiccups in the programs we try, and struggling to get through the basics of that first lesson, I made a decision. 

Best Tool For the Job!

I really loved the handout that came from Amanda Taylor at Cue (see previous post here, and scroll down for my version of it) and that paper handout became a cheatsheet or reference sheet for students to pull out again and again as they were sketchnoting in class. So my decision was for the first intro lesson was to push the paper/pencil handout.

​If a class had access to iPads and really wanted to use those then I would be fine with that. I had two middle schools where that was the case, in fact in one media arts lab they wanted my help with procreate. They had been working with doink animation and learning about layers and really wanted to explore more- yes this school bought procreate for their media lab iPads and they also had a stylus for each kid. ​I have been able to condense the lesson down to an hour, which is all teachers seem to be willing to give me. So being able to get the basics down and one quick 5 minute practice- this came from Ann and Pablo (again see post here) for the elementary and then for secondary I have found a couple that will work, or in the case of one science class I found a podcast and TED talk specific to their current unit of study. 

When I teach this intro lesson to teachers I make sure to include plenty of real classroom ideas, again some of these came from Ann and Pablo and I have found even more secondary examples and added them. 

As I have continued to read on the topic I found 5 Listening tips and tricks from Blah Blah Blah by Dan Roam that I make sure to go over prior to the quick practice. From what I can tell when teachers send me images from their classes much of what is taught in the intro lesson is retained and used as the teachers continue to practice. 

An important piece I have noted, many teachers need to be told the many uses for sketchnotes. Often because I practice with a podcast they think about just podcasts- which is great because honestly I don't think we use podcasts enough in classrooms, I know I didn't when I was in the classroom. The act of listening and synthesizing the information is a huge skill that the students need to do over and over again. I am constantly trying to ask people how they have used sketchnotes in the classroom because the more concrete ideas the better!

So without further ado I have three versions of my slide deck (the one below is the primary, it has probably gotten the most use). And don't forget that  cheatsheet/reference handout. 

Elementary Deck

Secondary Deck

Educator Deck

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Sketchnote Handout

There you have it, I have been practicing for over a year, have finally gotten into some classrooms, and I am really looking forward to the beginning of next year and getting kids started on this early! I will be doing a whole session with all of our ESL teachers during pre-service because they feel like this fits in perfectly with all of their research on language acquisition. So I might do an update after that happens! My other goal will be to get into more secondary classrooms. Hopefully this was helpful! 

Series Post 1
Series Post 2
Series Post 3
Series Post 4

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