Sketchnoting

If you are a tweeting teacher and you ventured onto Twitter over the weekend, you can't have failed to notice the hashtag #ililc5, which was, frankly, on fire from the evening of Friday 27th February until last night, Sunday 1st March.  Now home from Southampton, I, like most other delegates, am mulling over all the information that I brought home with me after such a language-packed weekend.

The conference began with Joe Dale's keynote - "Capturing the zeitgeist: What's new in the world of technology and languages", in which Joe took us through the some of the ways that things have changed for us in recent years.  He mentioned one thing that I hadn't heard of before: Sketchnoting.  This is where you present notes in a pictorial, doodling form.  The doodling aspect helps to improve memory and the understanding of concepts.  Joe described is as "old wine in new bottles".

I liked the look of the examples that Joe showed us, and accepted Joe's challenge of sketchnoting and tweeting the workshops that I went to during #ililc5.  I am a very visual learner (I discovered this while revising Virgil for Latin O'level), a prolific doodler and OK at drawing simple images.  The examples that Joe showed us had been created on tablets using a stylus, so I decided to try this way first.  On my Sony Xperia tablet I have SketchBookX and Notepad+.  My daughters and I enjoy drawing with SketchBookX; I have tried using a stylus but have mostly used just my finger.  Here are Reading Rabbit and a flower:

I encountered a problem straightaway.  I couldn't write with my finger, and writing with my stylus (just a cheap £4.99 one from Ryman) didn't really work either.  I couldn't get the hang of zooming in and out, which I'm sure would make things easier.  Here are a couple of my efforts, the first using SketchBookX and the second Notepad+:

For the next session I decided to resort to paper and my favourite pen.  I had only brought a lined pad with me, and on Sunday my lovely sister @elvisrunner gave me some of her stash of plain A5 paper, which was even better still.

So here are the sketchnotes that I made during the conference, and also the ones I have (re)made since I returned.  I hope you find some useful little nuggets in there to inspire you.

 Managing change: from good to great - @SenoraCT

Adding drama to Language Learning - @janetlloydnet

Standing out or outstanding? - @dominic_mcg

Show and Tell

Primary Language Learning: 1+2 - @SenoraCT

Google Apps for Education - @jowinchester

Techno-Phonics - @PrinceLanguages

Cooking on gas - keynote address by @lisibo

And here are two sketchnotes of my first session "Be a crafty languages teacher".  @lancslassrach used her fancy stylus on her iPad, and @simonehaughey used pen and paper.

I am definitely going to be persevering with sketchnoting, and will be attending two more conferences over the next few weeks.  I will practise some more with my tablet, as well as with some nice paper and my significant collection of felt-tips, and read the pins that I have on my new Sketchnotes Pinterest board to help me to develop further what I can do.  I have lots of fusty dusty notebooks full of notes I have taken at conferences and which I rarely look at.  This technique makes consulting them and therefore learning from them so much easier.

Thanks, Joe, for putting me on to this!