 My name is Karen Bosch and I'm delighted today to have an opportunity to talk with you a little bit about Let's Draw Some Attention digital sketch notes for learning as a part of the K-12 online conference for 2015. So to begin with, let me give you a little bit of background about who I am. I am a technology teacher, K through eighth grade at Southfield Christian School, which is located just north of Detroit in the USA. I began my teaching career as an elementary classroom teacher and spent many years teaching mostly third and fourth grade. And then about a dozen years ago, I made the switch into a computer lab instruction position where I worked with both students and teachers working with them with technology. And I am a person who has used Apple products for all my life, and particularly over the past few years, doing a lot of work with iPads. And so this presentation will come from the perspective of an iPad, which is what I use. However, any device that has a digital drawing app would be applicable to use for this. It doesn't necessarily have to be an iPad. And finally, I really am not an artist. I took a little art in high school. I would more describe myself as being creative. And so I want to say from the beginning that you don't need to be an artist to do sketch notes and to benefit from the technique. So I'd like you to know that pretty much everything that I reference in this presentation is going to be available for you on my resource page, which is at timeurl.com slash iPad sketch notes. And at the end, I'll give you a little bit of a peek at the page. And I also am on Twitter as Carly B. And I do sometimes tweet things about sketch notes. So I hope that you will look for me there and follow me if you are interested in learning more about this process. So I began doing sketch notes about two years ago. I was introduced to the process at an Apple Distinguished Educator Conference by Brad Ovanel Carter. I noticed that he started tweeting these sketch notes that he had made on his iPad over our different keynote sessions. And he was using the Paper53 app. And I just loved looking at them because they just really were able to capture in just a few words and a few simple pictures the essence of what the sessions were about. And so I decided, you know, I think I'm going to try this out. And I thought a great place for me to do this and practice on a regular basis would be with sermons at church. And so this is my very first sketch note that I did, very simple, very basic. I'm not really going to talk so much about my experience with sketch notes. But if you're interested in looking at what I have been doing and how that process has evolved over the past two years, I do have a link to my sketch notes that you can check out. Rather, I really want to look at this from the perspective of doing sketch notes with students. And just what does it take for you to do them with students and why should you do them with students? So let's begin at that basic question of what sketch notes are and why they are beneficial for us to be using them with our students. So basically what sketch notes are are a combination of text pictures and then organizers, things like bullets and frames and lines and arrows and connectors and symbols, combining those things together into a visual picture or visual notes, sometimes they're called, that represent ideas. It could be something you listen to, but it also could be a representation of something that you read or something that you've heard or a video that you watch. There's a lot of different ways that you can use these sketch notes, but typically people do them when they're listening to somebody talking. The key thing you need to remember when you're thinking about sketch notes is that they are ideas and not art. You don't have to be an artist to be able to do sketch notes, to make effective sketch notes and to benefit from sketch notes. I just had a student ask me this week saying, well, I'm not a good drawer. I don't think I can do this. And I said, yes, you can. And you'll be able to benefit from it, even if they're very simple drawings. And you'll see some examples from my students that will really illustrate that. So why should you be doing sketch notes? Probably the best expert out there is Sunny Brown. She has a wonderful book called The Doodle Revolution. She also has a great TED Talk. Both of these again are in my resource page. But in her book and in her TED Talk, she talks about how when you are doing a sketch note, you are involving all of your senses. You have your learning styles, you're being both visual, you're using your ears to listen, you're doing movement. And there's a lot of scientific data that she has documented that shows how this really enhances and increases your ability to listen, comprehend, recall, and then how it just really does stretch your creativity as well. So why sketch notes? For me, the key things are, first of all, active listening. You have to be totally engaged when you are doing a sketch note. Your mind does not have time to wander, whereas if I'm just taking notes by writing on pen and with pen and paper, there's lots of gaps where you just really are not engaged in listening to what's going on. I think it does force you to have a razor sharp focus where you are taking ideas and capturing them. I think that it really helps you to look at the big picture. Having to find what are the key ideas and weed out the details that maybe are not as necessary and significant. And finally, I think it really helps you make connections between ideas. And a lot of times I find myself making connections between things that I think, I don't even think the speaker noticed that that was a pattern or that was something that went together. So that ability to make connections as you are listening and processing the information I think is huge. And finally, I think that we are very much a visual society nowadays, and I think we do remember pictures much more than we will remember just a bunch of words that we wrote down on a piece of paper. And I think there's an added benefit to sketch notes is they're fun to revisit. I go back and look at my sketch notes all the time. I post some of them up in my computer lab for my students to look at. I think that I have piles of notebooks that I've taken at conferences and in school that I've never looked back at. Just no interest in seeing all those kind of dead written notes. But sketch notes, there's something alive and vivid and real. And I think because you revisit them, that gives you a better memory of them. So to get started with you doing sketch notes, either personally or with your students, I think it is good to note that you can do them just on paper with paper and pencil and ink. Markers, no reason why you can't do it in an analog way. I do think it's a little bit old school. I think one of the disadvantages is if you make mistakes and you try and erase or undo them, it just doesn't go away in a clean way. It gets a little bit messy. And it can get bulky, especially if you want to be able to have a lot of colors in what you're doing. You know, curing markers and pen and ink and all of that stuff can just be a little bit clumsy and awkward. Whereas if you're doing it with an iPad, all you need is some good apps and a simple stylus. I think there's a cool fun factor to doing sketch notes on an iPad, particularly as you get to middle school students and older. If you ask them to draw it on a piece of paper, they might turn up their nose but give them an iPad to do it on and it suddenly becomes fun again. The ability to be able to undo or erase on a sketch note that you do on an iPad is wonderful. The iPad is so forgiving and I think that's a huge advantage and takes away some of the stress for students when they're doing it. And personally, I just like the portability. I can toss my iPad and my purse along with a stylus and I am good to go for whatever event I am going to. I think one of the key hints that you need to do is you can't write down everything. So you need to really focus in on the things that really resonate with you and realize that there's some things that you're just not going to catch. And that's okay. The process to begin this, I think you really just have to dive in. Your first ones may be a little bit messy, a little bit awkward, but with practice you do get better and you develop your skills. Now when I'm working with students, I've put together a couple of great videos that I use that again are available on my resources to help them get started. I have about a six minute video that kind of talks about the sketch note overview that I just shared with you. And then another six minute video that talks about the different elements that I shared at the beginning, you know, text and the connectors and making the images and things like that. So students know what kinds of things they can incorporate into their sketch notes. And so what I would have my students do is watch both of those videos before we get started. Just a quick way to get yourself on the right track with your students. And then I also have another great resource that I'm very excited to share with you. Last summer I built an entire sketch note iTunes U course that is available for free. And this is a very detailed and thorough course that goes through all of the why and the how and it gives assignments for students. Something that you could work through as a teacher or an individual who's interested in doing sketch notes, but also something that you could use right off your iPad with your students. And it gives them everything that they could possibly need right within that course, including the tutorials I mentioned and a bunch of other tutorial videos as well. Another hint that I just want to share with you, sometimes I have no idea how to draw something. I'm not an artist. So like if you look in the top corner one of the ideas was fear and I was like, I have no idea how to draw fear. So I Google it. I Google it with the word clip art. I find a little cartoon drawing and usually I can kind of come up with somewhat of a replication of that and it helps me to come up with some kind of simple icon or sketch that I could use to illustrate an idea. I also like using the noun project, which has a lot of just very simple icons. Again, doing a search there to get ideas for different concepts that I'm having a hard time figuring out how to draw. One other hint that is really helpful to me is that you don't always have to do the whole thing in one sitting. A lot of times when I go to church, I do the text part and just the main basic ideas while I'm listening and then I come back home. I get a nice relaxing cup of tea, put on some nice music and I finish up the sketch note adding in the color, adding in the drawings, drawing in the arrows and kind of making the connections and cleaning it up. I really do like that two-step process because it gives me time to reflect on what I've heard and I think it just does help me to remember things better. So what will you need if you do sketch notes? Most students will want to have a stylus and I've tried out a lot of different styluses, both inexpensive and also some expensive ones for myself. For student use, I have found some very cheap styluses that I order from Amazon. They run about 50 cents each. They come in packs of three. They're shipped from China. They take about a month to get here but there's no shipping cost and so usually every year I just order a couple of dozen and I just expect that they're going to be somewhat disposable that in a year they're probably going to lose their tip or they're just going to get smashed or not going to work as well but because they're so inexpensive I don't feel like I've put a whole lot of money into them and I can just replace them as needed and the link to those will be on the resource page. I also want to talk just real briefly about some of my favorite drawing apps to use for sketch notes with students. Again, anything that's out there works fine. My personal favorite right now is something called Teasue sketches. There's a free version that works great. There also is a paid version that adds in a few more features. I like this app because I like the way the tools look. I like the colors. It has a really interesting texture fill that I enjoy using. It lets you put in colored backgrounds so there's a lot of features on this that I really like and I also like being able to put a grid in the background. I find that that is another trick that really helps you to be able to size and align your items as you're working with your drawings. Another app that is a great option particularly if you're looking for free is called Sketchbook X. It has nice drawing tools that you can customize, the opacity and how thick they are, customizing the colors. It has a paint bucket that you can use for filling objects and it even has three layers. If you get a little bit fancy and want to use the layers it's great. One thing I don't like about it is I love the watercolor effect that's in a lot of the different drawing apps that simulates watercolor and this one really does not have a good effect like that. The app that I have used the most with our students is something called Flipping which is a paid app. I think it's about $1.99 US right now. I think we got it when it was free. I like this one particularly because the interface is very intuitive. The look of the different drawing tools is very realistic. You can customize the width and the transparency grid for the background. Another feature that this one has that I find students really do like is you can type text on this one. I was kind of surprised but a lot of students they just don't like that idea of having to write things out themselves and so having that option to be able to type text is a nice thing to be able to offer them if they want to be able to use that. And then there's Paper 53 which really is one of the apps that I think a lot of the artistic creative people use. It used to be an app where you had to buy all the tools but over the past few months all the tools have become free. They also have added in some new tools that are kind of neat. It has a set called the Think Kit that allows you to draw shapes and do colored backgrounds. It also has just in the past month added in an ability to add in photos into the background and add a checklist at the bottom of the drawings. And they've had a couple of gestures that you had to use like a counterclockwise swirl with your fingers to undo and a loop that you had to do to zoom in close. And I really did not like those gestures and this latest update has done away with them. They've added in an undo button and allow you to just use your fingers to zoom and pinch in and out which I find a lot easier to use. The one down part about Paper 53 is now it has an account that it wants you to log into when you start the app. And I'm not sure if there's a way around that other than creating maybe a generic account for your classroom. So that's something that you do need to keep in mind with using this app that it may not be as wide open as it used to be. So I would like to just quickly look at some examples of sketch notes that my students have done and just talk a little bit about the process and what we've used for them. Just this past week I decided to use the idea of doing sketch note journals with my sixth graders and instead of having them to listen which is a little bit harder just having them start by drawing a sketch note from something from their own personal experience. It could be a day in their life, it could be a vacation, it could be an important event. I gave them two apps to use both Flip Ink and Teasui Sketches. I have tutorials that I have built for both of these apps that again I just let them watch the tutorials and decide which one of the apps they wanted to use. And again those tutorials are going to be available for you on my resource page. It was really fun to see what they came up with. They'd just gotten back from a fall retreat with their middle school and I loved just this very simple sketch note that gave an overview of what the main events were. Not fancy drawing but definitely captured the key ideas and I love that. Here's a student a little more artistic. He wanted to give a sketch note talking about his first day at our school and what were the important events in that day and I love how he put this together with pictures of meeting his friends and his teacher and so on. This student just had gotten in the school play and so she wanted to talk about what that process was like. You know the routine you know where you audition and you practice and you rehearse and then you finally give the play. Again perfect simple sketch note but definitely captures the idea. And here's another one my first day at dance and again I just like the simplicity of how they were able to represent the events in a significant day in their life. One of the fun things that happened after we had done a couple days of working on this lesson one of the students came back from chapel and said, look Ms. Bosch what I did. And while the speaker was talking she pulled out her notebook and put together this wonderful sketch note that summarized what the speaker had said and I love she even showed me each of the arrows has a different color and there was a meaning why she did each one of them in a different color. It represented different ideas that he spoke about. Absolutely loved it and it just was really gratifying to see that she had put in action what I had been teaching her and so that was kind of cool. Another thing that I just did last week is I wanted to try this with younger students and so I did it with our second graders. This one I used a kids drawing app called Drawing Pad. It is a paid app. I think it's maybe $1.99 right now US and I took a story that they had just read with their classroom about exploring space and we kind of threw out that the key question what do people need to be able to live and explore space and I did build a word bank for them to help them out. They told me what the different ideas were but I loved how seeing how the students put the ideas together on the sketch note what the important things were that they needed to have that they learned about and again I think by putting it together like this it's definitely going to help students to remember those ideas before a test. Kate loved was very proud of this that she put her title kind of in a little space shuttle and then she put the fire coming out of it. She thought that was pretty cool. I love this one just the way it was organized very simple but with you know cute little drawings to illustrate the ideas that they learned about. So another great way to work on this with students is by using either podcasts or videos. I did an activity where we did some online sermons and I love it if you have a computer lab where the students can watch the video on a computer while they're doing the sketch note on an iPad. What's great about this is they can stop and rewind and redo it again if they miss something or if it goes too fast they can pause it for a few minutes. Again a great way for them to practice and get used to doing it before maybe they jump into doing a sketch note live and here's just a few examples again of things that students did and this was done with the Flipping app. Love this one with you know all the colors and the way she organized her ideas together. Here's another one very simple using the text tool but I believe he really captured all the ideas from what he listened to and I think that was great. Another one here for you know how to keep from stressing out love how she put the umbrellas for her key ideas and that she thought through that those are kind of like the the protections for her just thought that concept was very very interesting. Here's another one again very simple but I love how he used the arrows and the little explanations the little marks to make things stand out to show you know kind of a pathway of what the ideas were like. Some of the things the students responded back the first time we did this I asked them to give me some comments about it and some of their key ideas were well I listen when I draw I listen better it's easy to focus it helps me to remember because I have to visualize it to be able to draw and so they really gave great feedback for me that they could see benefit in doing this sketch note process. I've also done this with sixth graders using discovery streaming videos. I think a lot of us have access either to discovery education or maybe we have there's some great videos on PBS learning media that are available for free and letting students watch the videos and take sketch notes. In fact if I were in the classroom and I and I had access to iPads for my students and I were showing videos to my students in class I definitely would use this as a technique because you sometimes kids just kind of zone out when you put that video up but this way they really do have to focus and filter the content as they're watching and they're listening so these are just some things that they did you know we didn't necessarily get everything spelled right but that's okay. Sometimes they tend to do more with organizing the ideas and not so much with the drawings and that's totally fine but as she was listening she was categorizing and putting her ideas in the different categories which I thought was great. This was one where they just were having a lot of fun again picking the big ideas and illustrating them and I just love the colorfulness of this again a great art but just a lot of fun. I did this with fourth graders using a science chapter on weather and again you can see some examples of how they pulled out the key ideas and illustrated them. I did find there was a little tendency sometimes that they just kind of wanted to copy the illustrations out of the book rather than put them into their own way of visualizing and so that's something I think I would rethink a little bit before I introduce the lesson to them to you know give them a few ways that they can break free of just copying something that they see in the book. I also did this using just a multiple giving the students a variety of choices of books that they could use to create a sketch note for and this was a multimedia class of middle schoolers. So one student chose to illustrate a story that they had read in English class another student chose to do a summary of the Hunger Games. This student chose to do social studies they'd been learning about the executive branch so kind of put a sketch note together with all the different key ideas. I love how she used pictures to show how the laws are carried out and how the laws are signed again I think pictures like that will help her to remember those concepts. This one was from the book of Ruth. I love how this one created a pathway showing all the different events in Ruth's life and then she also incorporated the family tree in there so I thought she did a great job summarizing an entire book of the Bible that way and this is one of my favorites. Cyan is definitely very artistic and she was doing the plagues of Egypt the 10 plagues. She started doing I think the one on the gnats with all the little dots and I said you know that is really cool. I said do you think you could illustrate every single number using something that represented the plague and so she worked very hard on this I love it and again I think that it is like such a perfect example of how using images and those pictures will help you to remember you know the boils to remember that that's the sixth plague and the hail and thunder that that's the seventh plague. These visualizations are just like the perfect way of helping students to remember ideas. Alright so that's just a quick overview of a bunch of different ways that I've been using sketch notes. I'd like to take a quick look at my resources at tinyurl.com slash ipad sketch notes. Let me pull that up here a minute and so this is what the page looks like. There is a link to the iTunes U course. I really would encourage you to check that out. A presentation that I've done recently and then here we've got videos, all kinds of resources, books, the styluses, educators who sketch note and then kind of an overview of apps, some of the pros and cons for them. So I hope that you will check that out. That page will continue to grow as I find more resources as well as the course will continue to grow and be improved as new things come along. So again, thank you very much for joining me. I hope this has given you a quick view into the value of doing sketch notes with your students and giving you some resources to get started with it.