Infographics

WebTool of the Month:  **Infogram**

|| Infogram is an amazing new web tool for creating infographics quickly and easily. The tool is very simple to use and offers a whole host of unique WYSIWYG editing options from dragging content around to in-tool data table formatting. This is sure to be a popular site as inforgraphics continue to grow in popularity. The site is free, robust, and going to be getting some more customized features and more templates soon. Looks like a great place for teachers and students to play with the art of visual explanation. ||  __ Click here to give Infogram a try... __

=The Best Resources For Viewing and Creating Infographics= January 11, 2011 by Larry Ferlazzo

Infographics are visual representations of data design to help communicate information clearly. They are great for English Language Learners, and the rest of us, too! The information can also be either serious or humorous.

To see examples of some of the best ones, you can visit: [|The Best Infographics — 2010] [|The Best Interactive Infographics — 2009]

You can find even more at [|The Best Sources For Interactive Infographics].

Of course, you don’t need online resources to have students create their own infographics that can be used towards achieving numerous learning outcomes, as I recently posted about at [|What A Great Infographic To Use As A Model For Students]. However, creating them online can also be both useful and fun — for both teachers and students.

Here are my choices for The Best Resources For Creating Infographics: I’m going to start-off with some of my previous “The Best…” lists, including:
 * [|The Best Resources For Learning About “Word Clouds”]
 * [|Not “The Best,” But “A List” Of Mindmapping, Flow Chart Tools, & Graphic Organizers]
 * [|The Best Tools To Make Simple Graphs Online]
 * [|The Best Sites For Learning About Cartograms]
 * [|The Best Map-Making Sites On The Web]
 * [|The Best Posts To Help Understand Google’s New “Books Ngram Viewer”]

And here are resources from other sites:
 * [|Make Your Own Infographic] from the Wild Apricot blog.
 * [|5 Unbeatable Types of Infographic + Free Tools to Create Them] comes from The Search Engine Journal.
 * [|10 Awesome Free Tools To Make Infographics] is from The Make Use of blog.
 * [|5 Amazing Tools to Create Your Own Infographics] comes from Techchai.
 * [|Visualize Everything: 32 Free Tools To Create Different Diagrams] is from the 1st Web Designer.
 * [|Teaching With Infographics | A Student Project Model] from The New York Times Learning Network.

The World Bank [|held a competition for Web developers to create interactives making the World Bank data more accessible]. They have received an amazing number of these online apps. You can see all the submissions at [|Apps For Development]. I’m not sure how many, if any, are accessible to English Language Learners, but I haven’t checked them all out and, in fact, have barely scratched the surface. [|Better World Flux] is one that’s getting a fair amount of attention. It’s particularly attractive since users can quickly create their own visualizations with the app and share them with others.

[|NewsLab] has developed some nice video tutorials on using two tools to create infographics — [|Google Maps] and [|Many Eyes]. Here they are:
 * [|I posted about a site called Daytum] two years ago — before it opened for the public. It’s a super-easy tool to use to visual any kind of data, though its primary purpose for people to use it to keep track of personal data. I had forgotten about it until I saw an article in The New York Times — [|Illustrating Your Life in Graphs and Charts] — that mentioned it. I’m adding [|Daytum] to this list.

The Outreach Editor at the Wall Street Journal has developed a cool tool call “SparkTweets.” They are simple infographics like this one (the tweet itself didn’t come out the way I had hoped, even though I used the [|Blackbird Pie tool] to copy it — oh well, you get the idea):

▇▆▆▇▇▇▇▅▂▁▁▂ Last 12 months of the U.S. unemployment rate, which rose to 9% in April. More data: [] [|less than a minute ago] via web

**[|Wall Street Journal]** WSJ They’re very easy to create at the [|Sparkblocks site]. You can also learn more about it at the [|10,000 Words blog]. In addition, you can see how people are using them at the [|#sparktweet] hashtag.

[|Create A Better Life Index] lets you, without having to register, create an infographic emphasizing the qualities that you believe are key for a “better life” and showing how different countries in the world are doing in those areas. You can then share your infographic with others. It’s from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). I also have to mention the new website [|Visual.ly], which began this year and is a source of great infographics and new tools to easily create them. They will be rolling out these tools throughout 2011.

[|A Few Rules for Making Homemade Infographics] comes from The Atlantic.

[| Creating Infographics with Students] is from Langwitches.

[| Visualize.me] lets you immediately turn your resume into an infographic. Unfortunately, right now it only works through Linked In. However, [|its founder says it will integrate that ability to other sites], too, including Facebook and Twitter.

[|The Anatomy Of An Infographic: 5 Steps To Create A Powerful Visual] is a useful outline.

Feedback is welcome. If you found this post useful, you might want to consider [|subscribing to this blog for free]. You might also want to explore the [|nearly 600 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled]. Categories: [|best of the year], [|social studies], [|teacher resources], [|web 2.0] | [|Permalink] ===Author: [|Larry Ferlazzo]=== I'm a high school teacher in Sacramento, CA.