Effective visuals that help

Jennifer Gonzalez explains that graphic organizers also help us meet the needs of all learners. Presenting information in both text and graphic formats is one of the most basic ways to make a lesson accessible to more student

Use graphic organizers to take notes on their reading, when doing research, while watching a film, or while listening to a podcast. If you are already familiar with the content and how it’s structured, you might choose or design an organizer ahead of time for students, which research says can be more effective and efficient than having students create their own. Use FocusNotes creates the structure for the Cornell Method of note taking.

William Klemm, a professor of neuroscience at Texas A&M University, says the process is akin to a zip file. Klemm advocates thinking in images and stringing them together into what he calls “story chains,” to vastly improve how much students can remember. Sketching notes makes these story chains visible and tangible.

TedTalk with Sunni Brown talks about how doodling or sketchnoting can unlock your brain via pad and pend. Studies show that sketching and doodling improve our comprehension -- and our creative thinking. Here are some templates to get you started!

We tend to remember imagery better than words. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't use words when creating flash cards, but maybe we could use a mix of both images and words.

Allan Paivio came up with the theory in 1986 hypothesizing that visual stimuli are dually coded in the brain to give it an advantage of the text stimuli. Since then, various experiments have supported his notion and expanded the importance of imagery in cognitive activities.