Infographics.
The week four topic is entitled ‘Digital
Tools 2 – Digital Media’ and covers images, audio and video as media for
learning. These areas can also be
divided into 1. Products that are already developed and presented and 2. Learner-centred
or learner created products.
In my work life I have created digital
images, created podcasts and uploaded them to my own iTunes channel and created
videos both with moving video and with slides, music and words and I have uploaded
them to a YouTube channel. However, I
have never tried to create an infographic before. So, for this week, I have chosen my stretch
goal to be creating an infographic. I have found some great examples of infographics on the ACARA website.
I really enjoyed the blog post by ResourceLink which gives some really interesting background to the rationale for using
infographics.
Firstly, the availability of information is
exploding, which is fueled by the Internet.
With such large amounts of information available, society needs better
ways of communicating information. I am
also reflecting that the generation of students that we are teaching are given
so much choice with their media that they have an interest in short presentations. Youtube and the Internet allow our students
to click away really quickly if what they are watching does not engage them
quickly. I think infographics are engaging.
Secondly, as the Resource Link blog post
points out, the Melbourne Declaration requires that in order for students to be successful, confident and creative
individuals and active informed citizens, they must be able to comprehend
interpret and extrapolate information is a wide variety of formats. An infographic would be one such format.
Thirdly, the Resource Link blog suggests
that 60% of learners are visual. Most
sources seem to agree with estimates of between 60 and 65% of learners being
visual. It seems that infographics will
be a very useful in visually capturing information to support visual learners - who happen to be more than half the class.
Finally, infographics are used by students
to direct their differing views toward rather than at each other. So infographics seem like a really useful
tool in prompting critical thinking or deeper thinking (Blooms Taxonomy) and
making a safe environment for students to share differing perspectives.
The Resource Link outlines three main ways
that Infographics can be used: as a
source of information, as a tool to teach visual and critical literacy, as a
way for students to express data.
I found that some interpretations of
infographics are very wide. For example, the flickr site Class Room Infographics has examples of images that provide data only on one level. There
are also examples of essentially electronic posters about history topics in
this group. If we are looking at the
SAMR model, the presentation of a bar graph on a city wall published as an
image or an image of a poster about Mark Zukerberg, fits with substitution
as this is an example of the tool being used as previously an excel chart or an
A1 poster chart would be used. This step
is an important step in utilisation of the technology and hopefully teachers
will progress on to more transformative uses of the technology as the SAMR model suggests.
I really liked this teacher created Blog onusing Infographics to tell a story from data (a skill that is fast becoming a
must have skill for our era.) I loved how this author used research done by
San Francisco State University on designing infographics. As an aside, in the picture of this blog,
students are standing in a technology classroom taking photos of something at
the front of the room. When I studied my
undergrad in the early 90s, we didn’t even have a mobile phones, let alone
smart phones and so we all took hand written notes. After I graduated and worked in tertiary
teaching, we provided power point notes and I remember the uproar when the
lecturers were asked to upload their power point notes for the students to
download. (Some lecturers resisted and
provided paper print outs of the slides outside their door). Around 2010 the students began to take photos
of notes on the board and videos of lectures.
Here’s the top 10 tips for designing
infographics
The main aspect of an infographic for me is
that the visual gives a really good overview of the data, but that the user can
at find the source of the data on the infographic or, more ideally, they
can drill down to the data using the infographic.
Spyrestudios demonstrate another ‘style’ of infographic which
illustrates choices and uses images and colour coding both for encoding and for
visual effect. This type of infographic
reminds me of a ‘Prezi’ presentation which uses type of concept map type to make the presentation that acts like a network structure rather than a procedural structure as can be seen in power point presentations. I have created Prezi’s before, unfortunately
never got to use them as management were expecting a power point presentation
and the risks involved with a Prezi are both technical and conceptual.
There are many tools that can be used to
create infographics. I found a good list of tools here
I found this really interesting class lesson using an infographic to create
instructions to do something.
After looking through lots of information about different tools, I tried easel.ly as recommended by the course materials.
One of the benefits of using Easel.ly is the
templates and themes because these make it easy to get a more professional look
with a pleasing colour theme.
I used Photos for Class and searched for a
photo of an office space with identifiable productivity tools.
I found an interesting article about
productivity gains using two monitors.
The article includes a lot of data about the time saved in switching
between documents if you have only one screen.
I thought it would be an interesting exercise to ask the students to
interpret the data and showing it in an infographic. There are also a lot of facts in this article
about how many times people switch documents.
The students can find a suitable background
and import it into easel.ly. They can use
the objects to report the facts and they can create a chart. My reflections about using the tool are that
it is interesting, but could become very time consuming and will need to be
carefully planned so that the students don’t get bogged down in perfecting the use of
the tool and have nothing to show for their work. I could insist that the students create a
plan for their infographic. I could also
ensure that I scaffolded their learning about how to use each of the
tools in easel.ly. Perhaps I could ask each student
to complete one task and then demonstrate how to do that task to create a video
on how to do that task and upload it so that others can view it. I think I would like to use instructional
differentiation as well to set different tasks for each of the groups based on
ability so that I am challenge each of the groups of students.
Here is the example of what I created.
It is not possible to embed it into Blogger, but I can share it here.
Reflective Learning:
# Don’t try to do too much at once. Set an achievable goal and then improve on
that.
# Create a plan on paper first of what the
infographic should show.
# Create different versions of the
infographic so that you can easily revert to a previous draft if you don’t like
the current direction.
# Time was wasted because I had an
application in mind, but I chose a tool that wasn’t able to do the
application. I had to either choose and
learn another tool or modify the application.
I chose to modify the application.
Because I modified the application I produced an end product that I wasn’t
entirely happy with. Really, I should
have gone back and chosen the right tool.
In class I would have a fixed learning outcome and I would not be able
to modify the application as I did here.
# Interactive infographics are another
level from what I was able to achieve in this very brief foray into infographics. One initial idea was to add
comments on each of the productivity items in the image that I used – Easel.ly does
not allow this type of functionality and to add the mouse hover over, I would
be better off using a bookmarking tool.
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