Category Archives: digital sketchbook

Digital Sketchbooks

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Sketchbooks, like journals, are often fertile fields from which great works are developed. They are also a dumping ground for mental clutter that can clog our thoughts.  The polymath Leonardo da Vinci knew that.  His sketchbooks are an amazing collection of observational drawings, improbable inventions, calculations and even a few thoughts on love. The blend of sciences, arts and occasional nonsense in his work were a direct reflection of his thinking.  (I actually advocate a personal sketchbook for everyone.  I think it is a healthy exercise)

The important value of a sketchbook is not that it is a place to jot down an idea or sketch out a vision.  Scratch paper and meeting agendas also serve that purpose.  The true value of a sketchbook is that it is a keeper of past ideas and visions.  It creates a context and history for the latest ideas.  It is this continuity that promotes the strongest progression of ideas. Regular use of one is a discipline that rewards.

I have been unsuccessful in my efforts to have my students to work in sketchbooks as preliminaries before sculptural projects. It is a little tricky.  I don’t want to assess planning. I also respect the differences in creative arcs we all hold. Collecting the books could easily disrupt this still forming discipline. Spot checks are distracting and time consuming. Without points at stake, many opt out of having this treasury of ideas an attempts at their fingertips.

Suddenly, on of the gifts of this year gave me an idea. This year I have only one, small section of sculpture students. This seemed to be a great opportunity to try out a new process.  We will now be exploring digital sketchbooks (DSBs in our classroom).  We are using the free Autodesk app called Sketchbook. It is a great app – TRY IT.  The image archive on that app is called a Gallery.  We will make a separate folder in the gallery for each assignment.   They will jot rough ideas and more developed sketches as the concepts expand. Each page, good and bad, will go into the folder. The progression of ideas is often easier when an array of all attempts is available.

When this idea first came to me, i was happy simply because their iPads are already daily tools and many expect to use them for each class.  I was no longer adding weight to their packs.  Then I realized three bonuses for my class. 

I am fascinated by the creative arc.  I love to watch it unfold in class. I see it as a type of metabolism, a process of intake and output. Like our bodily metabolism, your creative metabolism can be modified with proper attention. Understanding your personal process is essential in getting your bet results.  To assist that understanding, students will take photos of their projects at various midpoints. These process photos will go into the gallery folder for each project. Later, presentations on their personal creative processes will be their gift to their classmates at semester finals. Their DSB will hold all they need to convert to presentation form.  Because gallery is too large of a file to upload on schoology, the students will take a screenshot of the portfolio (thumbnail page) for uploading. We will see the arc of their project on one or two pages!

Also, I try to emphasize process over product everyday in my classroom.  This condensed combination of drawing and process documentation will make it easier for me to assess their efforts towards the goals. In a manner of thinking, this portfolio will be more important to me than the finished piece.

The final bonus is identification.  Some of our sculptural materials do not allow for their names to be easily attached to the work.  We make tags and such but their is always a piece or two that it unnamed and difficult to credit.  Now, their project folder can have some images of the result and I will have an easier time tracking down the artist when the tag falls away.

Franken-drawing! Sketching Cause & Effect

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I thought I’d write a quick update on how I have applied Martin Cisneros’ ideas about sketching to learn to a recent lesson.

About a week ago, I asked my Classics of Horror class to create a visual map of the consequences of Victor’s fateful decision to play God. Ultimately, my goals were three-fold. I wanted to (1) assess how well students understood how elements of the plot related to each other, (2) deepen and challenge their thinking about an element of the plot that they might not have thought deeply about, and (3) prepare students for a class discussion on the topic.

I let students decide if they wanted to use a digital sketchpad or paper and pen. Half chose digital, half chose paper and pen. After 10 minutes of mapping, I asked some students to share their maps with the class as a discussion springboard. The digital sketches were inherently easier to share than the paper maps due to the bold, colorful lines. These digital maps were easy to scale up and to project. They were more audience-friendly.

Here are two students’ map:

From my students’ maps and how they talked about them, I learned that students had thought a lot about how Victor’s decision to create the monster affected his family but had not thought about the effect the decision had on Victor himself and his best friend Henry Clerval. In this sense, the maps were effective in allowing me to quickly assess student understanding. When I brought up the omissions I noticed, the class addressed the Victor/Clerval consequences in an ensuing discussion that (hopefully) closed a gap in their thinking.

Students seemed to enjoy mapping though it was hard for the perfectionist-types to be ok with a quick, imperfect sketch. Like any well-crafted “pre-writing” exercise, the drawing helped prepare students for discussion. I believe that mapping helped me achieve all three things that I hoped it would – assessment, engagement with novel, and discussion prep.

At the end of this unit, I will collect some data on students’ perception of this activity and another sketch activity I have planned. For now, I’m left wondering about a few things. Did students really learn more from drawing this map than they would have from writing about consequences? Sketching is fun and something different in English class, but has Cisneros overstated the benefits? How can I better measure the impact of this teaching method on student learning?