Innovative Teaching in Science: Creating Doodle Notes

In my last post I explored the cognitive advantages to using Doodle Notes in the classroom. Downsides to providing students with a sheet of blank paper and asking them to copy down your doodles is that you lose the time efficiency of a fill-in-the-blank note and their thought process and creativity might be stifled by your own. For those reasons I created a scaffolding for the Doodle Notes, so that my class time was being used efficiently, students still had opportunities to infuse their own creativity and I could explain why I chose the images and paths that I did… and maybe part of the reason was that I am too type-A that my own doodles would take forever to draw out.

For the most part, I create my Doodle Notes in PowerPoint (I am learning Adobe Illustrator but the learning curve is STEEP!) I’ve found I can perform most tasks in PowerPoint quite well, but Adobe Illustrator has some technical advantages.

With PowerPoint, I can create quickly. It is easy to import clipart and fonts that I have purchased. I can even create custom shapes by using the “Edit Points” option. There are limitations, but most of these are visual and do not affect the students’ learning (inability to change the thickness of line art, difficult to “lock” objects in place).

Adobe Illustrator has a huge learning curve. I'm a Science teacher, not a graphic artist! I’ve been using tutorials and templates to help me along, but these come with a cost - the most expensive being the time it takes to learn and create. The biggest advantage to using Adobe Illustrator is the masterpiece that is created once the scaffolded Doodle Note is complete.

Either way, students are more likely to go back and study from their Doodle Notes, compared to their more traditional notes.

With either program, I begin with determining which orientation I think would work best (portrait or landscape), and create a 8.5”x11” slide or art board. After reviewing what concepts I want to cover, I write out the content on the page (which I later remove for the students to enter) and search for images that support the content. I consider what the students can color in addition to what they can draw and write. I start with the key images - that might be the Sun, Moon and Earth for a Doodle Note about solar and lunar eclipses. As I proceed, and position the image and text elements, I add connectors like arrows to solidify those connections for the students. A lot of adjusting happens throughout the process. It does take a lot of time to create, but students start begging for these notes once they’ve had a taste!