Sketchnoting FAIL

A popular acronym in education is FAIL:

• First
• Attempt
• In
• Learning

After attending a #fallcue session on sketchnoting, I embraced my budding artistic skills and began experimenting. In an effort to combine my work with touchscreen Chromebooks, I decided to use the Sketchpad app on an Acer R11 with a conference giveaway stylus pen. As you can see from my growing gallery of sketchnotes here, there are ongoing attempts at learning happening.

One of my initial frustrations with sketchnoting was my inability to write words. Based upon several PLN conversations, I ended up changing to a mesh tip stylus. As you can see from the sketchnote in the top right corner of this post, my sketchnote writing was still a bit sketchy. @rockourworld suggested sketchnoting on a grid background layer to keep words and ideas level.

While comparing my efforts to @maoliver17's sketchnote of the same keynote (bottom right corner of this post), we discussed strategies for visual notetaking. In an attempt to resolve issue with writing words, I decided that I need use thicker lines. I had been too worried about using thin lines so that I could fit more information on a page. @maoliver17 also commented that visual notetaking has its own vocabulary. Developing the symbols and images to represent common words and ideas will take time to develop.

It has been a busy couple of weeks FAILing.