![]() ![]() Try starting with a template when students create their first infographic, then try another with an empty canvas to challenge them further. Sketch and experiment in a Writer's Notebook. Don't just discuss content, but purpose, design, and organization. If you're considering diving into this 21st century text with students, the process is simple. And of course Prezi provides an easy means of creating interactive infographics with plentiful templates and a zooming canvas that never fails to impress. A colleague recommended easel.ly as a useful website that helps students create professional infographics when a class is ready to move beyond PowerPoint. I had one student use Piktochart to create the Philadelphia tourist assignment, and she found the website user-friendly. In the upcoming school year, I look forward to engaging with this type of text further and investigating the many online resources for creating infographics. Was the infographic easy to understand on the first read? Did fonts and simple icons help to meet this objective? Was there a "flow" to information, or was it cluttered? Did the facts chosen work well given our purpose of attracting tourists to Philadelphia? Here are examples of what my students created:Īs a class, we critiqued the work onscreen. ![]() After all, a key to good revision is knowing what to remove - in this case, the facts that would be irrelevant to potential tourists. Notice that while we were basically reshaping the information in the article, it was important to introduce a target audience and purpose at this point. After reading our Article of the Week entitled " 50 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Philadelphia," I challenged them to create an infographic from scratch that used text, color, and design to highlight several of the facts that would be most likely to attract tourists. I live and teach in suburban Philadelphia, so my students have visited Philly many times for sports and cultural events, field trips, etc. While templates helped us dabble in infographic creation, it wasn't until we actually had to transform information from article form to infographic form that we faced the complexities of infographics from scratch. Lopez established a student's right to a hearing prior to a suspension. The example to the left shows current suspension statistics after Goss v. This year, we combined these three in an Article of the Week reading assignment:Īt the end of a research project about Supreme Court cases that have influenced the rights of teenagers, students prepared an infographic using multiple sources of information cited in a Works Cited Page and one template from the collection linked above. ![]() Using the website Daily Infographic or just a Google Image search for the word "infographic" will help you find three that work for your class. ![]() So after a few exposures to basic infographics, we studied three very different infographics side by side. This makes them particularly good for helping students to swim deeply. Every decision, including font, shapes, color scheme, and use of white space, will either contribute to or detract from the overall clarity of the message in the finished infographic. The key to creating infographics is understanding that the finished product looks deceptively simple. It was like asking them to read Animal Farm after completing Great Expectations - there was an immediate “can do” reaction. The first thing students noticed was the substantial time savings in reading an infographic or two versus a traditional article. I occasionally substituted an infographic or two instead of the news articles or essays they were accustomed to reading. I knew that this year I wanted to have students experiment in creating their own infographics, so I made an early decision to build infographics into our Article of the Week routine (inspired by Kelly Gallagher). I have always encouraged my student writers to "swim deeply" when they read and write, moving beyond the basics, braving the imposing waters at the "deep end of the pool." Reading and writing infographics is like cannonballing into ten feet of water - you splash in deeper and more quickly. As texts compete for attention with soundbites, scrolling headlines, tweets, and vines, writers and readers alike are seeing the value of text that uses visual design features to organize ideas, provide background, and emphasize key facts in ways that make it easier for readers to engage a topic thoughtfully. ![]()
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