Storyboards are great for Financial Services revision. They work well for everyone, but are more time-consuming than some other methods of revision. Some people will find that it’s worth their while going to the extra trouble, because it works for them. That’s to say, after making so much effort up front, they can remember the information later, really easily. And we know that if you put enough effort in at the beginning, remembering it later is a doddle. Story boarding utilises your powers of vision, movement and association, using several parts of your brain at once, therefore creating the neural connections you’ll rely on later to recall the information.
The people who’ll probably benefit the most are our Kinaesthetic people – people who are really good at doing stuff – practical things. Because you’re turning the information you need to learn, into a story, consisting of people who are indeed doing stuff.
Storyboards are what film directors do to plan out the entire film, the sequence of events. (So they can keep tabs on each scene they film. You know they don’t film the scenes in the same order they’re going to appear in the film, right? So they use a storyboard to make sure all the sections are eventually stitched together in the right order.) And you can use the same technique to remember what you’re learning.
What you need to do, is draw some images; pictures to represent the keywords. That should be easy enough. You won’t have critics looking over your shoulder, so it won’t matter what your pictures look like, as long as you know what they are supposed to be!
Now that you’ve had a chance to think of some images, it would be sensible, if you’re going to turn them into a story, to swap them about to make it easier for you to create that story. Put them in a logical order that makes life easy for yourself. You can do that whenever the list of keywords doesn’t have to be remembered in any particular order, so you can swap things about.
Once you’ve done that, you need to fabricate a bit of narrative that will help us to remember our key points.
Creating story boards uses many parts of your brain at the same time. It uses your visual skills, creativity, story telling skills, logic, sequencing. It involves movement – a story is a moving thing, unlike a snapshot. Those of you who are good at copying an action that someone else is doing, will get on well with this method. It’s probably more time-consuming than just making bullet points, but sometimes you need to go the extra mile on information that otherwise just won’t stay in your brain. That’s why I often say that the more you can develop your visual skills, no matter what your starting point, the faster your Financial Services revision can be.
