I must admit I didn’t realize there was another post this course. Here I am trudging along and enjoying the frustrations of my working on my final project, and BAM! Jeff posts about a 6th post. Then, I realized I never looked at week 5 work. Sheesh! Overwhelmed much!?!
- Photo credit: HowardLake via Visualhunt.com / CC BY-SA
Infographics are just stunning! I love how fast one can briefly learn about a topic. For me, this means a huge worm hole. If I truly get captivated, I then spend hours on that topic. I suppose that could be the point.
I decided last year to use them with my students. My 8th grade classes worked in pairs or individually and created infographs based on a social issue they researched.
I was very pleased with how well the infographics turned out. I will do this lesson again this year as well. Sadly, I cannot remember exactly what instructions I gave the students for this project. Here is what I do remember:
- Students chose one other person to work with or they could chose to work individually.
- Each person/group chose a different topic from their peers.
- We looked at a many types of infographs before they began the project.
- I gave them several tools to chose from to complete their project. (This one was tricky! As there aren’t too many free tool options for infographs that allowed students to create and publish.) I will introduce Canva this year when I do the project.
I think the valuable aspect of it for me is that we were all learning this tool together. I had never completed an infograph prior to this. So when a student discovered how to use a tool, he/she shared with others (and myself) who didn’t know how to use it.
Ms. Marcum's Mission 
Wow! I’m really impressed with the students’ products. They far exceeded my expectations for what an 8th grade student could produce, which is a good thing.
It seems like there is so much power in simplicity these days. I would much rather look at an infographic than read a paper about gender equality and human trafficking.
I feel infographics are more of a call to action, whereas written text can be seen as more informative.
I wonder if there has been any research done about that? Comparing inspiration and action from text vs infographics…
Anyway, I would love to teach middle school and give my students more opportunities to create visual data like this.
Very inspiring. Thanks for sharing.
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Reid,
Thank you! I feel that the students came away with more understanding of the social issues when they were required to visualize them by creating the infographiccs. It took their research and as you said, made it a call to action. The students’ work went beyond my expectations as well.
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