Sketchnoting in the Classroom

Solution

iPad + Explain Everything = Sketchnote Success

Ready to dive in, I now needed to find just the right tool if this was going to be successful. I decided on Explain Everything (Interactive Whiteboard) for several reasons:

• Easy to use
• Affordable
• Provides built in organizational tools
• Can handle multiple pieces of information combined with multiple doodles
• Makes visual note taking and doodling easy and fun
• Has the potential to allow us to eventually add the final piece in multi-media options
• Allows us to eventually share with others
• Has accessibility tools to support spelling and writing fluency weaknesses (iPad!)
• Will encourage creativity and keep up with student skill growth
• Has collaborative option (allowing student to student collaboration or teacher to student collaboration/support), which is a bonus for our class.

We started by taking time to learn and explore all of the different tools Explain Everything offers and the potential of each tool. With a basic understanding of the each tool’s capabilities I gave my students sometime to break in the app and practice doodling, writing, and typing in Explain Everything.

Next we talked about how Sketchnoting was going to look on the iPad. “How can we possibly fit an entire sketchnote on one little screen?” a student asked. So we talked about and tried out the different ways students thought we could sketchnote using Explain Everything.

First, we tried the “putting everything on one screen” idea. Even with the free arrange and group option, having everything on only one slide while trying to capture new information was too complicated and visually overwhelming.

Then we tried putting notes wherever we felt like it. Sometimes information and images were put on a single screen with overflow on new slides and some slides had just text while others had text and images combined. This left our information unorganized and what I like to call a “hot mess”.

Then we came up with the “one idea per slide” idea. When we heard/read a fact or idea we wanted to capture we would write it on a slide. Next idea/fact, new slide. When all the important facts/ideas were captured students then used the group option and free arrange to arrange all the slides together on one slide at the end.

This final idea really worked for us and stuck with us. Suddenly the complexity of it all became simple and the idea of sketchnoting on the iPad was an empowering and fun experience. This sketchnoting method has not only become an amazing tool for me and my students, it has also become the preferred method for many of them.