According to dictionary.com infographic is not a word, but I have a feeling that it will be soon. If you google it you get 50.4 million hits.
I think infographics are a great fit for the classroom. They help differentiate and reach multiple learning styles by being linguistic, visual, and logical/mathematical.
Making them can be a challenge. Either you meticulously collect data and spend hours upon hours drawing it out yourself or you turn to the internet.
I started trying to make my own, but ain't nobody got time for that, so I began scouring the internet for infographic creation sites. I chose to experiment with two of them:
visual.ly & infogr.am
Visual.ly
Visual.ly offers a visual resume, editable venn-a-gram, and eight themed infographics. The venn-a-gram allows you to put your own data into a bunch of different venn diagrams. The remaining options require you to link a social networking account with visual.ly, including Twitter, facebook and linkedin. Visual.ly collects and displays your social data for you, which eliminates the most painful part of infographic creation: the data collection. However, you give visual.ly access to your data by doing this and I'm not entirely sure if I like that. For instance you give them permission to follow people as you, while I'm sure this is just limited to them getting you to follow their twitter account, it freaks me out. The "You are what you Tweet" and "Life of a Hashtag" infographics on the left I made with visual.ly. They are pretty spiffy. Sometimes they worked well, but it took me over 40 tries to make the "Life of a Hashtag" for #I4Ed. It was very frustrating. This, combined with the sketchy permissions I have to grant visual.ly to make infographics, has lead me to revoke all access visually has to my Twitter accounts. I wouldn't use it again, even though they make snazzy infographics.
Infogr.am
I didn't want to make a new account at yet another new website, so I signed into infogr.am with my Twitter account. The permissions infogr.am request aren't as scary as visual.ly's and if I don't want to sync accounts I don't have to. I can create my own infogr.am account.
Infogr.am offers six templates that are customizable with various text styles, chart types, timers, maps, pictures, and videos. You can input the data yourself or upload it from a spreadsheet file on your computer. Admittedly, infogr.am infographics don't have the pizazz that the visual.ly ones do. However, you can make infographics about anything with infogr.am, instead of limiting yourself to social data. Below I have given the highlights of my life in writing. I like infogr.am and will continue visualizing data with it.
Making them can be a challenge. Either you meticulously collect data and spend hours upon hours drawing it out yourself or you turn to the internet.
I started trying to make my own, but ain't nobody got time for that, so I began scouring the internet for infographic creation sites. I chose to experiment with two of them:
visual.ly & infogr.am
Visual.ly
Visual.ly offers a visual resume, editable venn-a-gram, and eight themed infographics. The venn-a-gram allows you to put your own data into a bunch of different venn diagrams. The remaining options require you to link a social networking account with visual.ly, including Twitter, facebook and linkedin. Visual.ly collects and displays your social data for you, which eliminates the most painful part of infographic creation: the data collection. However, you give visual.ly access to your data by doing this and I'm not entirely sure if I like that. For instance you give them permission to follow people as you, while I'm sure this is just limited to them getting you to follow their twitter account, it freaks me out. The "You are what you Tweet" and "Life of a Hashtag" infographics on the left I made with visual.ly. They are pretty spiffy. Sometimes they worked well, but it took me over 40 tries to make the "Life of a Hashtag" for #I4Ed. It was very frustrating. This, combined with the sketchy permissions I have to grant visual.ly to make infographics, has lead me to revoke all access visually has to my Twitter accounts. I wouldn't use it again, even though they make snazzy infographics.
Infogr.am
I didn't want to make a new account at yet another new website, so I signed into infogr.am with my Twitter account. The permissions infogr.am request aren't as scary as visual.ly's and if I don't want to sync accounts I don't have to. I can create my own infogr.am account.
Infogr.am offers six templates that are customizable with various text styles, chart types, timers, maps, pictures, and videos. You can input the data yourself or upload it from a spreadsheet file on your computer. Admittedly, infogr.am infographics don't have the pizazz that the visual.ly ones do. However, you can make infographics about anything with infogr.am, instead of limiting yourself to social data. Below I have given the highlights of my life in writing. I like infogr.am and will continue visualizing data with it.
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