Sketchnote to AI InfoGraphic

Today was one of my favorite lessons in my middle school media literacy class: We started our “Froot Loop Conspiracies” unit about the Moon Landing Hoax, Lateral Reading, and using the SIFT web literacy framework to vet and verify online information and sources.

Today’s introductory lesson involved watching the first two of three videos, and starting a sketchnote about the key ideas.

First we watched the 3 minute YouTube video, “Online Verification Skills — Video 1: Introductory Video” by Mike Caufield. (3 minutes)

Next we watched the 4 minute CBS Sunday Morning episode from 10 years ago, “Meet a puppeteer with a gift for pulling strings.” I preface this video with a slide and some discussion about Harry Potter 3 “The Prisoner of Azkaban,” the dementors, and what it means to be “pulling someone’s strings” like a puppet, trying to manipulate them.

At this point in the semester, my students have already learned how to create sketchnotes on their iPads, first sketchnoting Rachel Smith’s TEDx talk, “Drawing in Class,” and next sketchnoting John Green’s CrashCourse video on “Using WikiPedia.” Today I chose to sketchnote on our classroom whiteboard, and this is the VERY basic sketchnote I was able to draw “live” while watching these 2 videos with the students in class.

Here’s why I titled this post, “Sketchnote to AI Infographic.” I’ve been aware for several months about the amazing power of Google’s Gemini AI “Nano Banana” image generator, particularly when paired with an image prompt generated with Anthropic’s Claude AI and an actual “base photo” to use in the image. I’ve documented some of those discoveries on my “Learning AI with Wes Fryer” website.

This was my AI media creation workflow this afternoon:

1. I generated an AI image prompt using Claude AI, uploading a photo of my whiteboard-drawn Sketchnote and a PDF of my entire lesson from Canvas for background. (archived Claude conversation available)
2. I used Gemini AI and uploaded the whiteboard sketchnote photo (again) with the Claude-provided image prompt. After five different iterations / tweaks, I now have an infographic I’m quite pleased with. (archived Gemini conversation available)

Being able to create a high quality infographic based on my own sketchnote and lesson details is FANTASTIC! I’m quite excited to share this with my students during our next class.

I may challenge them to use one of the AI platforms they have access to (our school licenses Flint AI) and try a similar “sketchnote to AI Infographic” transformation.

I’m a HUGE fan not only of media literacy education, but also #create2learn pedagogy, which is embodied in the website I’ve maintained since 2013, “Show with Media: What Do You Want to CREATE Today?”

Give this “sketchnote to AI infographic” media creation workflow a try, and please let me know the results!