Beth Holland shared her presentation “Used Effectively or Simply Used” from the ASCD conference 2015 as a slide deck via Twitter.
The message from her slides caught my attention… I kept thinking about the questions Beth proposes we ask when we walk into a classroom:
- Are students engaged?
- Are students creating artifacts as evidence of their own understanding?
- Are students constructing their own knowledge?
- Are students sharing their learning?
- Are student reflecting on their learning?
I have noticed that sketching a message (spending time thinking more intensely about it)
- helps me think about the topic on a different level
- I am making different types of connections
- I seem to remember the message better, based on the fact, that I sketched, colored, arranged and doodled around it
- doodling seems to activate a different area in my brain than reading alone or writing text with bullets on a paper or typing them up
- choosing font styles or filling in letter outlines with colors gives me extra time to think about hierarchy and keyword importance
- makes me concentrate on the message I want to convey
- focuses me on the most important part of the presentation and how I could represent it
Have I used technology effectively, when I created the above sketchnote?
- Did I create an artifact to show my understanding of learning from Beth’s slide deck?… Yes, the sketchnote was created
- Did I share my learning? Yes, I shared by writing this blog post and by sharing the image via Twitter
- Did I reflect on my learning? Yes, creating the sketchnote was NOT an artistic exercise, but a tool for my reflection process.
- Was I engaged? Yes, I was self-motivated and focused on doodling the message I extracted as valuable from Beth’s presentation
- Did I construct my own knowledge? I maybe could have done a better job in ADDING additional questions or connect to other ideas. I was able to connect learning from/with Beth’s presentation to my sketchnoting exploration.
Could I have used a piece of paper, instead of the iPad app (the technology involved here)? I could have… some people can… I am completely inapt to draw or write legibly on a piece of paper…
cross posted at langwitches.org/blog
Silvia Tolisano is a Curriculum21 faculty member, author of the book Digital Storytelling Tools for Educators and founder of the Around the World with 80 Schools project. Read more at http://langwitches.org/blog.
