Infographics

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: