Tag Archives: present

by kapoho17 | July 2, 2019 · 2:35 pm

Sketchnotes

Sketchnotes are a way to take notes that organizes thoughts and ideas in a visually stimulating way, without requiring artistry skills.

The ability to summarize or synthesize what we have learned is an advanced skill and sketchnotes are one way of teaching and practicing this skill. They allow the listener to focus on what they are hearing so that they can pick out what were the most important things to remember.

Keywords can be bolded, arrows & lines allow eyes to follow sequences, boxes or bubbles can help categorize thoughts that are related but might be thought-tangents, and icons are the visual pieces! None of these require master drawing skills but the more practice occurs, the better your sketchnotes will appear.

Students aren’t always taught how to take good notes which can cause them to write EVERYTHING down. The practice of sketchnoting is really just a way to learn how to paraphrase, summarize, and refocus to what’s really meaningful. The can be used in PD events, taking notes for various classes, and even a way to present information.

Decide on your medium!

– Paper, pens, pencils, highlighters, rulers
– Tablet, digital stylus, sketching app

Popular Digital Tools

– Apps: PaperBy53, Sketchbook, ProCreate, AdobeDraw, and Forge but any drawing app will work (even Explain Everything or Book Creator!).
– Styluses: Apple Pen, PencilBy53, Adonis Jot Pro, Targus, **or find any cheap/free pen with a touch-sensitive tip!

What Can I Sketch??

– Visit sketch50.com and try a different sketch over 50 days – you can view what other’s are sketching too using the hashtag #sketch50
– Check out what other educators have done with their students
– Visit Sylvia Duckworth’s website (A Canadian Teacher) or read this quick visual guide to get started by skethnote-love.com

Practice the Elements & teach them to your students!

Many of these elements are great for teaching basic art skills too!
– Lettering & Fonts
– Bullets
– Frames/Dividers
– Connectors & Arrows
– Shadowing/Bolding/Highlighting – when is it too much or too little?
– People & Icons

Image by By @meacherteacher, Jody Meacher

Digital Whiteboards

Digital whiteboards are also known as Interactive online whiteboards. They are a blank canvas and depending on the application, you can add images, hyperlinks, draw or annotate them, upload videos, and some allow voice recording. Several allow real-time collaborative co-creation while some are more for individual use with sharing options. There are a plethora of options available today with many proprietary, paid options, a few fully free and some with varying levels. I’ve even found two ‘open educational apps’ FIPPA compliant (data housed in Canada) that are worth a try. See the ‘getting started’ section below for a few options.

Digital Whiteboards provide a space for students to document their learning, often in multimodal ways. The blank canvas can include drawings, text, images, video, and voice recordings allowing students to create a raw presentation to be reviewed by the teacher or a polished edited version to share with others. Most whiteboard style applications allow for sharing with others and some have ‘collaboration’ options. Digital whiteboards might be incorporated into student assessment (‘showme’ what you know or understand about…), as brainstorming spaces or individual/group project planning or presentation spaces.

These applications can provide students with choice in how they want to display their learning!

Decide on your learning objective and what you want students to achieve. Digital whiteboards can be used to capture various parts of a students learning journey.
Learn what tools are available on your classroom or district devices because some are free while others have a cost.
Download the application or visit the web tool and allow students to play and learn some of the basic functions before assigning structured tasks.

Here are just a few ideas of how a Digital Whiteboard could be used:

Explaining: Explain how they’ve come to a conclusion or answer by providing a visual explanation.
Presenting: Transform a powerpoint format into a presentation that features their annotations, explanations, and share it as a video that can be refined before being viewed by others.
- Advantage: Students can hear their voice and re-record their narration until it sounds correct to them.
Collaborating: Work with a partner or in a group and record multiple ideas on the one application. This goes beyond a poster because they can add in videos, overlay them with graphs or additional images, and then record different voices to explain their creation.
Documenting: Students can create a portfolio that documents different projects or components on each canvas page.

Below are a few examples of interactive whiteboard apps. Click on one to learn more!

ShowMe – free ipad based with cloud sharing space allows voice recording, image uploading and annotating.
Explain Everything – mobile based app allows image & video upload, annotations & audio narration.
Educreations: Interactive Whiteboard App

AWW app – web-based with free templates
Padlet
JamBoard
WhiteBoard Chat allows for a teacher to launch student boards.
Whiteboard.fi is another free whiteboard application I only recently came across. It’s been developed by Kahoot so is worth a look. Teachers can create a ‘classroom’ and provide join links for students.
Miro is another whiteboard application with a variety of templates including mind maps and flow charts. Pin notes, type and free draw. Free access includes 3 whiteboards with unlimited team members collaborating. One thing I like about Miro is the ‘infinity board’ aspect… the board can be VERY large and just keep growing with a neat little map feature so you can see the whole board at a glance.
Etherdraw and Draw.io are both Open Source/Open Access Apps that are also FIPPA compliant are available thanks to the wonderful community at OpenETC!

Storybird

Storytellers can bring life to words as they weave together details that create beautiful imagery in your mind and now there’s a digital tool that can bring those images to life. Storybird is a cloud-based tool that allows students and teachers to select from a variety of high-quality images and artworks to tell a story. Be inspired to create new worlds and stories based on beautiful professional artistry provided through Storybird or find images that resonate with a story that’s been waiting for an illustrator.

Images as story prompts can help inspire ideas and creative expression in learners. This can be accomplished using printed or projected images in the classroom. With Storybird, sudents can select different types of images provided by professional artists that vary by style and theme. They can read thousands of student-created stories or professional stories while also contributing to this literary community. Younger students can create picture books while older students can publish their novels while also engaging in peer editing from other readers. Students could also create stories to share between buddy classes in the school where early readers can read their stories to older buddies while older buddies assist with creating the stories online. Multilingual students will feel empowered by creating bilingual stories to share or co-creating with peers while learning about a topic. Another option provided by Storybird is to publish the book in print for students to take home to their families for an additional cost.

If students are using Storybird to create digital stories, this is a great step to practice storyboarding, scriptwriting, and pairing appropriate imagery for their creations. Storybird is also a great entry-level for creating digital content because it doesn’t require student emails and its platform is without technical challenges thereby leaving more time for the imaginative creation of content.

Create an Educator Account (at one time this was free access, in Sept 2023 the fee structure seems to have changed and the free account access is now quite limited)
Create a class and end date for that class.
Add students without needing student emails (remember student privacy).
- Optional: You can link google classroom accounts and parent emails
Assign a project or create a fundraiser using Storybird (optional)
Let students login and create their first book! (download the student invitations with login info)
- Let them be inspired by artwork OR have them visit the how-to guides for a more scaffolded approach.

Note** Teachers and individual users can be rewarded with “crowns” based on how often they submit stories. These can be redeemed for specific guides and other digital downloads from Storybird. NB: Always carefully consider individual needs and differences, class climate etc before undertaking any kind of reward system in the classroom!