Originally published in TEACH Magazine, November/December 2017 Issue
Looking to spice up lessons when it comes to teaching complex material? Infographics may be your answer. These visual tools are a great way to make stories, facts, and data more digestible and engaging for students—and with infographic websites conveniently available at your fingertips, it doesn’t take much to create them. Here are some suggestions.
Easel.ly
(Free – Website)
Honoured for its user friendly design, this app won the 2013 Best Websites for Teaching and Learning Award from the American Association of School Librarians (AASL). Easel.ly offers a drag and drop interface for ease of use. You have the option of customizing pre-made layouts or creating your own original design from blank templates. Choose from Easel.ly’s wide collection of graphic elements or upload your own images. You can also access hundreds of free articles and webinars to help get those creative juices flowing.
Infogram
(Free – Website)
Inforgram is a web application that provides more than 35 interactive charts and over 500 maps to help you present your data, including pie charts, bar graphs, column tables, and more complex visuals like word clouds and fact and figure illustrations. You can connect live data sources like Google Sheets or Dropbox to your infogram projects to automatically update new data. Inforgram also offers a collaboration platform where teachers can create team accounts for entire classes to get students involved in data literacy activities.
Piktochart
(Free – Website)
With a library of over 600 professionally designed templates, Piktochart is useful for pictorial infographics like flow charts, instructional steps, comparison posters, maps, and visualized articles. It has a built-in spreadsheet function where users can input numbers and create graphics straight from the data. You take your content to the next level with Piktochart’s Presentation Mode while looking for inspiration in the featured gallery, where you can see what other users have created using the templates available.
Visme
(Free – Website)
Visme is a platform that allows you to attach free music and sound effects to your infographics. You can even record your own voiceover right within the infographic tool—a great way to create visual stories with narration. You may also make your infographics more interactive with the option to animate any object, insert links, and create pop-ups. Users can also embed maps, polls, surveys, and more.
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