Infographic Reflection

Over the last few years, I've found infographics more and more to be a common ways to present information, and especially data, in a really interesting format.  To me, an infographic is like a digital poster, but one that is designed to be digested in increments.  Rather than a single image and message or caption, a good infographic requires (or rather entices) the audience to navigate through a series of facts, figures, diagrams, and icons to tell much more of a story than your average poster would.  The nice thing about the digital format is that one can make the it much larger than a single computer screen since you can scroll and zoom around to focus in on any one part of the graphic.  I particularly like the super tall format in which the graphic height might be thousands of pixels so it can be read more like a visual document similar to an actual physical scroll. The infographic to the right is a great example from Space.com.

This past fall, for the first time, I had my students create their own infographic as part of the introduction to 9th grade science.  They had to explain the four main "spheres" we'd be studying throughout the year (Geosphere, Hydrosphere, Atmosphere, and Biosphere) and show how they are interconnected.  Since I hadn't used any Web 2.0 tools for something like this, I had them use PowerPoint to make their infographic because I knew it was an application they were all familiar with.  The process was a little clunky since PowerPoint isn't really intended for this purpose, but the results were decent.

Now, having tried out Canva, I feel like this tool would have been perfect for this assignment.  I've since done a little poking around and found that there are a whole bunch of sites dedicated specifically to this type of content, including Venngage and Infogram, just to name a couple.

In the everyday classroom setting, the biggest issue for tools like this is ease of access, and the biggest obstacle is having students bogged down trying to create new accounts.  At least with Canva, I really like the fact that users can login using their Google account.  It makes access so much easier since the majority of my students already have Google accounts.  I've been noticing, in fact, that a lot of up-and-coming Web 2.0 tools offer this option for logging in, including Adobe Spark, which is what I've been using to post my own experiences throughout this EDIM 510 course.  When having students generate their own online content, it is crucial to make the most of the precious 50 minutes we have each day, and it seems that a lot of sites are catching on.

Using PowerPoint still works, of course, but there's only so much you can do with the SmartArt tools, and they are getting a little outdated.  To really create something informative and visually appealing, it definitely takes some ingenuity and finesse, which is not necessarily the main thing I'm assessing in my students.  The templates in Canva are pretty professional looking and I was impressed with what I was able to produce in a pretty short session.

Below is my own infographic, in which I created a timeline of one of the most important decades in the US space program: