Last week I attended a five-day conference in Austin by Texas Computer Education Association (TCEA), and while there, I challenged myself to do two things:
I'll talk about why I wanted to focus on using my iPad in a later post, so let's get straight to Numbers! Prior to any long conference, I like to set up my notes and plan out my sessions. Conferences like TCEA are huge with a seemingly unlimited number of sessions available at any given moment. The sessions don't all begin at the same time, and they can be located on different floors or even in different buildings. Many sessions have limited seating, so you have to show up early to ensure you get in the door. In short, it can be really overwhelming to go in without a plan - I personally get a lot more out of a big conference when I plan ahead. On Sunday morning before we left, I was ready to start planning. I already had a pretty good idea of the sessions I wanted to hit, so I created a new document in Numbers and got to work. I created a simple table on the first page to note the title, time, and place of each session I planned to attend. And, because I'm as Type A as it gets, I color-coded my cells based on the focus of the session. Note that my original table didn't look like this. There were some sessions I originally planned for that I switched, or in some cases didn't make it into before the seats were filled. I absolutely had to update my table as the week went on, but since it was already built, I found it easy to do a quick update of my landing page throughout the day. I ended up being really happy I chose to color-code my landing page because I wanted to be sure to attend a variety of sessions, and this gave me an at-a-glance view of what types of workshops I was attending.
After building my landing page, I created another sheet within my document to use as a template for each session I would attend. I included a title bar colored to match the color-coded table, and a text box with placeholders for the presenter's name and a place to link the digital resources for each session. During the sessions I also linked their Twitter handle to their name when available. Throughout the week, I simply duplicated my template tab for each session. You can see the different sheets on the tabs at the top of a Numbers spreadsheet, which are easy to click through to access the notes from each session. In general, my preferred modality for taking notes is Sketchnoting, which you can read about here. However, there are also times when there's a lot of detailed information that needs to be captured. I would typically do any writing in a Google Doc. However, Numbers allows you to add text boxes to blank white pages, so it was easy to include notes in both modalities. In the note below, I created a checklist in Numbers to write out different definitions of innovation, and also added my sketchnote as an image. (The sketchnote was made in a different app, Paper 53). I love how polished the image looks with a border and drop shadow! Overall, I was absolutely thrilled that I challenged myself to try something new, and I love how my notes turned out! I think Numbers could be a powerful note-taking tool for learners because you can mix the modalities of note-taking as well as beautifully organize the different notes you're taking. Check out all my notes below!
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