I presented a webinar yesterday afternoon - Infographics in the Classroom on Anne Mirtschin's Tech Talk Tuesday. See
http://techtalktuesdays.global2.vic.edu.au/2012/05/27/infographics-for-learning/
I usually present on topics that are related to my practice, that is, what I have used in my classroom. However, my past two sessions with Anne, [What's the Interest in Pinterest & Infographics in the Classroom] have been on topics that I haven't touched on with students [ or yet anyway]
Infographics and their application in the classroom really interests me and has for a few years, both as in the receptive mode, [ i.e students reading and analysing the information from them] and in the expressive mode, [i.e. students creating them].
I first started tagging collections of them in Delicious, here are my collections
http://www.delicious.com/ictedservices/infographic
and here
http://www.delicious.com/ictedservices/infographics
However, since the advent of Pinterest, I now collect them there, as you see all the thumbnails of them immediately. See
http://pinterest.com/ictedservices/infographics/
My presentation for the Blackboard Elluminate session is here Download Infographics and the Classroom
The link to the recording session of the webinar is here
https://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/jwsdetect/playback.jnlp?psid=2012-05-28.2333.M.6541246D3E9338D3527F7F28C11BE7.vcr&sid=2007026
This was a very interesting webinar to run, and I certainly found out a lot, so here are some of my learnings.
Infographics - The Receptive Mode
Why are Infographics Important?
http://www.slideshare.net/ripetungi/why-are-infographics-important
This is a great presentation by Robin Richards, and while not focussed on the use of infographics in education per se, it provides an excellent overview of infographics, and is downloadable.
As for collection of infographics, there are many. This is one that was sent to me, [thanks Kara], - Visual Loop on Pinterest has over 3800 infographics arranged into 70 boards, see http://pinterest.com/visualoop/. While some aren't necessarily suitable for schools, others certainly are e.g. http://pinterest.com/visualoop/climate-change-infographics/
Visual Loop adds a new infographic every day!
Also, thanks Jenny for http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/
Other collections I found were
Cool Infographics http://www.coolinfographics.com/
and
Visual.ly Showcase http://visual.ly/#gc_filter [I'll mention about visual.ly in the section below, too]
Also on Twitter follow @DBInfographic for some great tweets to infographics
I mentioned in the session that we really need to teach students how to read, analyse and evaluate the data and graphics in an infographic. I believe infographics are really a text type of their own. Infographics are crammed with information, but often discrete parts of an infographic [depending on its structure] and makes sense on their own. So with younger learners, you could just give them a part of an infographic to deal with. Or give a group a whole infographic to work on collaboratively. Or in small groups give each student a part of a infographic. Let them work on their part individually, then join other group members to share. Let them do a lot of talking and explaining!
Also we really need to encourage the use of all the thinking skills of Bloom's Digital Taxonomy when students use infographics. Students need to use the infographic to increase understanding, but also so they can use the content and analysis in their own created work.
Infographics - The Expressive Mode
When I started looking for Web 2.0 tools to create infographics, I came across this blogpost.
http://librarianlifestyle.com/2012/04/13/how-to-create-your-own-infographics/
It alerted me to two Web 2.0 tools that create infographics.
Visual.ly http://visual.ly/
and
Piktochart http://piktochart.com/
Both are reviewed in the Librarian Lifestyle Blogpost. It's worth reading.
I only had little time play with these, but if you listen to a Simon Pankhurst in a recent Australia Series webinar, you will find out more about Infographics and Visula.ly in detail. See https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2012-05-24.0318.M.E58F6EDFFA5FA3EDE727DCFB80FBD8.vcr&sid=2008350
During my webinar and after I also found out about two other infographic creators
easelly [beta] http://www.easel.ly/
and
infogr.am http://infogr.am/
I haven't had a chance to play with either, but they both look interesting.
You could also just use software such as Illustrator, Pages, Inkscape or Publisher etc. to create infographics. In Simon Pankhurst's webinar [see above], he mentions how you can use PowerPoint to make infographics.
As a result my webinar. we decided to set up a collaborative space on infographics. It's called Infographic Classroom. It is designed so that we can all share what we know about infographics, where we can find them, how we can make them and how we can use them in schools.
At the moment the site needs to be populated, but will have content shortly.
This is the link. https://sites.google.com/site/infographicclassroom/home
If you have something you would like to add to Infographic Classroom , please email me, ictedservices@gmail.com and I will give you access to the site so that you can contribute.
If we get enough content of how infographics are used in the classroom, we will hopefully be able to share this on a future episode of Tech Talk Tuesdays.
