Doodling an essential skill to develop & support in our students?

The langwitches blog discusses a not very popular topic, because doodling has always been something that has been used to "kill time". Now that researchers are discovering it is in fact effective it could open several doors for teaching and for students to learn from. The first discussion talked about a movie a teacher played. She had students write notes on the movie and then she discovered the one student who doodled his drawings instead of hand wrote it took down much more information and detail. It depends on the type of learner you are of course, but it is obvious that this works well for visual learners. In a specific clip doodling was defined as to make spontaneous marks to help yourself think. How true, it really is extra detail on the side to help students think deeper into what they are learning. A couple questions that have been asked are, Does doodling calm a mind that is constantly bouncing off the wall? Yes. Is doodling beneficial for a visual learner? Yes. The problem is as I mentioned before it may be a learning device that is only successful for specific learners. But is has proven more positives than negatives and seems to be getting really high and positive ratings on the idea of getting this involved in classrooms more.