Making Infographics

Infographics are all the rage, and I found a website to allow me and my kiddos to make our own!  Thanks to the article Inventing Infographics: Visual Literacy Meets Written Content by Brett Vogelsinger that I found on Edutopia I have discovered easel.ly and piktochart.  I am very visual and biology is very visual.  I love the idea of having students read and summarize what they have read as an infographic.

Piktochart seems to work a little better on the iPad, but it is still a little difficult to manipulate some options that are easy to do on a computer.  Piktochart also has a lot of "Pro" options for $290 a year or $29 a month, but choose the education package for $39.99 for the year -- who wants to buy me a year?  And there is a bulk pricing option as well.  I think I will be sticking to the free version.

Easel.ly gives you the choice of portrait, landscape or mobile (long).  So if you limit your students to portrait or landscape they could be printed out for meet the teacher night or put in their interactive notebooks.  Easel.ly doesn't seem to work well on the iPad at this point, and that means I have to plan ahead, get into the computer lab, and hope the computers work ...  Easel.ly feels a lot like Prezi, so if the kids already have experience with Prezi it might be easier.

If you haven't heard of Prezi, it is a zooming, flipping presentation tool.  You could make an infographic in Prezi and present it.  I have used Prezi for years.  It can be used in lecture or as student presentations.  It is good for a change of pace and to demonstrate how to make a concept map, to hide some material and keep everyone together, and now to make infographics.  The possibilities are endless.

I am thinking about having the students learn to make infographics in forensics when they research different jobs in forensics.  This would make it easy to compare the different roles, responsibilities, and requirements of the jobs.  Then the students would have "making infographics" in their toolbox of options to use in other projects.  I think I may put them in groups and everyone make an infographic using a different site or template so we can compare within groups and between groups.

I think that my AP students could use infographics to present research on hot topics using infographics.  This may even play into our mini-posters for lab.  I like the idea of students being able to practice writing, summarizing, making visual representations of data, and practicing presenting information in a clear way.

What would you have your kids do with infographics?