Visual Notes from Steven Anderson & Kyle Pace’s ISTE Session for Administrators

Yesterday at the 2013 ISTE Conference in San Antonio I attended Steven Anderson & Kyle Pace‘s “Curation, Creation, and Collaboration for 21st Century Administrators” session. Instead of blogging the session with text notes, as I normally do, I drew some visual notes which I finished up this morning using Brushes for iPad.

CCC for Digital Age Administrators

All of the referenced resources from Kyle and Steven’s session are listed in this shared Google Doc.

On Tuesday I took visual notes for Stephen Johnson’s keynote, “Where Do Good Ideas Come From?” I posted that image to the ISTEconnects blog as well as my own. I also added both of these to The Sketchnote Handbook Flickr group on the suggestion of James Tiffin. As happened with the previous drawings, my visual note taking inspired some post-presentation conversations with other attendees very interested in what I was doing. Someone asked if I could make a video of the drawing like the RSA Animate series, and I said I thought so but hadn’t done that previously.

This afternoon I found Janet Vanderhoof’s post, “How To Record iPad Brushes Playback,” and was able to download the “Brushes Viewer” app from a mirror website since the official Brushes app site is apparently down. I chose to export my drawing video at 60 fps (frames per second) instead of 30, which is the default, to speed things up a bit. I uploaded it to YouTube… so now you can see my drawing process. As recommended by Giulia Forsythe, I first drew my images with a narrow point black pen (on the iPad) and later filled things in with color, using a background layer. Remember this is my THIRD attempt at visual note taking… yes, my icons for people ARE going to get MUCH better in the weeks ahead!

I’ve started my own Flickr set for “Visual Notes.” I also made a Brushes animated video of my drawing for Stephen Johnson’s keynote. I think the ability to create videos like this is VERY cool as well as potentially instructive from a process standpoint.

To learn more about visual note taking, check out the visual note taking page on “Mapping Media to the Common Core” as well as my $5 eBook, “Mapping Media to the Common Core: Volume I” which includes a full chapter on visual notes. You can also read my post from earlier this week, “Visual Notetaking at ISTE 2013.”

4 Replies to “Visual Notes from Steven Anderson & Kyle Pace’s ISTE Session for Administrators”

  1. John Fox

    Hi Wesley,
    Thanks for sharing your experience at ISTE. Wish I could’ve attended.

    Do you have Brushes 2 or Brushes 3 loaded on your iPad? Any issues with using the Brushes Viewer with Brushes 3?

    Thanks!
    John

  2. Wesley Fryer

    John: I have the original Brushes app which I’ve just continued updating… I’ve used the free version of Brushes 3 on student iPad Touches at school. When I created these animations with Brushes Viewer I was using that older version that has been updated I think, rather than Brushes 3, but I’m not positive. I haven’t had any compatibility problems, but these were my first experiences creating animations from Brushes drawings.

  3. John Hall

    I have an early version of Brushes on iphone and ipad but am having to upgrade with an iphone 5. I hear Brushes 3 doesn’t allow play frame by frame playback back of paintings on on either device. Is this so?

  4. Wesley Fryer

    Sorry for the late reply, John. No, that is not correct – the free/updated version of Brushes3 DOES permit frame-by-frame playback. I haven’t exported the playback as a video though on Brushes3, I’ve just done that with an older version.

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