I was inspired by Martin Cisneros’s Google Summit presentation (Carondelet, Aug. 5) “Making Thinking Visible.” Though his session was aimed at teaching ELL students, I’m convinced some of the sketching strategies he shared would benefit all students.

After Cisneros shared research that people are more likely to remember something if they draw it, I was sold on the idea of incorporating more sketching into my curriculum. What if we had all are students DRAW their notes? Or, as Martin more boldly posed, “What if we had them draw their final exams?” (I’m not there yet…)

For ELL students, drawing can be a powerful way to demonstrate knowledge. As Cisneros explains, drawing is also a fundamental element to learning necessary academic language. As his slide pictures below, learning is more than reading and writing – it is visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and emotional. To best equip ELLs to master their academic language, they need to have the opportunity to engage with the target language in these rich and varied ways.

Digital sketchpads can be a key ingredient to making learning more dynamic. There are so many digital sketchpads out there: Notability, Awwap.com. “Notes” app on iPad all work. My favorite is Google’s Autodraw  because it has a machine learning feature that guesses what you’re drawing and actually draws it better!

My flower:

AutoDraw’s Machine Learning flower:

Exactly what I was going for. 🙂 I actually have mixed feelings about the AutoDraw feature. Not everything has to be perfect… But sometimes it’s nice to have your drawings “shine” as Cisneros says.

Here are three ways I think I’ll use sketchpadding after this session:

1. Have students sketchnote a passage from a text.
2. Have students sketchnote a portion of class discussion
3. Have students sketchnote directions, complex process to check for understanding
4. Have students sketchnote what they learned in class at the end of class.

Does anybody else use digital sketchpads in their classrooms? Would love to hear what you’ve tried out or are thinking of trying out.