Let’s talk about infographics. I love them, and I’m
pretty sure I’m not
the only one. They catch my eye and deliver lots of info in a pretty package,
but I never thought about their usefulness beyond their “fun
factor”
until hearing a TED talk by David McCandless. He discussed how infographics can
be used to represent information that our brains might not otherwise be able to
easily process. He gives the example of a country’s budget. Knowing that a country spends
X amount of dollars on a new pipeline does not mean much to the average person,
but looking at a map of where all of a country’s money is allocated allows us to see
just how much a pipeline really costs. This is how infographics should be used
– to take numbers and turn them into an understandable story. As discussed in
an interview of Alberto Cairo by Connie Malamed, infographics are more than a
pretty picture. They are a way to get “raw data” into a visual form that a human brain can
understand and digest much more clearly than by looking at a spreadsheet full
of numbers. I enjoyed reading about different ways that educators are getting
on board with the infographic movement. One way was a teacher who basically had
her students conduct and entire research process, and after mining through
information, they had to determine what was most important and condense it into
an infographic. Though I am an English teacher and think that research papers
have their place J , I still think that this is a great
tool for other subjects and even at times in an English classroom – like when
you are trying to teach historical context of a piece of literature.
I checked out 3 different free websites for
infograph generation: easel.ly, piktochart, and infogr.am. They all have
different benefits and drawbacks, depending on what type of infograph is being
made
Easel.ly
This site has a lot of cool themes for infographics.
You can also include hyperlinks or videos in your infographic, which is great
for educators who will be posting their infographics online. I saw a lot of
great flowchart templates on this site as well. However, there are almost no
free graphics available. You can upload your own, sure, but then you have to
deal with white backgrounds. I chose not to use this site for my infographic
simply because of the lack of free icons/images. However, if I needed to make a
flowchart, this would be my generator of choice.
Infogr.am
This site had a live chat box available which is
awesome for users who need help doing something specific. There were a lot of
charting options available, the most out of the three sites I looked at. I also
loved that there was a map option which would come in useful for an infographic
involving geographic data. I made an infographic on here and liked it, but
could not download it without upgrading to a paid membership. I might have been
doing something wrong, but it seemed complicated and I am all about free
resources, so I continued on to Piktochart to see if that would work for me.
Piktochart
This site was the winner for the infographic I
created. The dashboard is easy to navigate and the selection of templates is
wide. It is easy to customize and it was a breeze to download my final project.
You can even download individual parts, or blocks, of an infographic which
could come in handy. Piktochart had a huge assortment of icons that were easy
to search through, so that was a big bonus. My one complaint is that I had such
a hard time getting expanded text to show up on my chart. I wanted my chart to
be labeled, but there was not room for many characters in the labeling area. I
ended up making my own textbook and overlaying it on the chart. I could not easily
figure out how to expand the chart text, so that was my biggest critique of the
website.
Below is the infographic I made that presents information from this article on cybersecurity:
