5 Great Sketchnoting Books for Education

While you can learn sketchnoting from social media and pictures, there are a handful of sketchnoting books for education which are far better.

These curated and carefully arranged books provide information and inspiration that will help you bring sketchnoting into your classroom.

While there are many books on sketchnoting for education (and they grow each year) here are five I’ve read and found useful.

Sketchnote Handbook by Mike Rohde

The first book on Sketchnoting is from Mike Rohde, the man who invented (or came up with the term) sketchnoting.

In this book, Mike introduces the concept of sketchnoting, why you should Sketchnote, and different elements in sketchnotes and he covers some basic techniques that will aid your sketchnoting.

• Check out the Sketchnote Handbook

Sketchnote Workbook by Mike Rohde

While Mike’s handbook introduces and teaches many core concepts, the Workbook has practical activities to build your sketchnoting skills.

Not only does it have tutorials and examples with spaces to sketch in your book, but it provides more diverse applications for sketchnotes than the handbook.

Honestly, I’d recommend this book over the handbook (but both are great so get both, and support Mike).

• Check out the Sketchnote Workbook

Visual Notetaking for Educators

This book is targeted towards general education teachers in America.

It includes a lot about how the brain works and how using doodling can help. The writer mentions about teaching English in a “second language context” (people living in a country where English is spoken) and towards the end of the book, there are some practical ideas of how to implement sketching in your classrooms.

Importantly, this is about visual notetaking and visual thinking in general and not limited to just sketchnotes. That’s a great strength but if you want something that’s sketchnote specific, look elsewhere.

• Check out Visual Notetaking for Educators here

Sketchnotes for Educators

This book is by Sylvia Duckworth who has become quite famous for her sketchnotes around education principles.

If you’ve seen someone share a sketchnote about education online, it’s probably one of hers. In this book, there is a collection of her 100 most popular sketchnotes that you can use, share and adapt as well as links to online versions.

• Get Sketchnotes for Educators here

The Doodle Revolution

This book isn’t strictly about sketchnoting but it is about using visuals and drawing to aid in thinking. It’s also targeted more towards adults and business settings, but there is some useful information on how using visuals can be an aid in “non-visual tasks”

• Get it here

What Other Great Sketchnoting Books Do You Know?

This isn’t a definitive list, there are many more books on sketchnoting, visual notetaking, and graphical facilitating, mostly looking at things from a business perspective, but these are a great starting point.

Do you know of any other great sketchnoting books?

P.S. Check out this list of great analogue sketchnoting tools