September 15, 2013

Creating an Infographic

Although Infographics have currently become a popular option for visualizing data, their use can be traced back as far as the 1600s. Today we use infographics to llustrate (1) information, (2) data, and/or (3) knowledge and to help us recognize patterns and trends. Infographics include visual components (the graphics), content represented by the data, and knowledge that is learned.  [Wikipedia contributors. "Infographic." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 15 Sep 2013.]

Line after line of text is not exciting reading for many. And then add lots of numbers (data) to that text and we lose even more readers. An infographic can help to make that information interesting. OK... I know what infographics are and why we use them. I have used infographics to learn and to teach, but I had not yet created one of my own. It was time!

I decided to use Infogr.am to make my first infographic. I created an account. The website does not include an online manual; however, for most actions a manual is not needed. It's not difficult to work through the process of creating an infographic. I had no problems until I tried to change the palette of colors available for my infographic. It looked simple. And actually it was. However it took several tries to change the text colors available rather than the background colors.

[Note: I have removed the actual infographic because this post continues to crash. I'm testing to determine if there was a glitch with the infographic. 11/2/2013]

It's easy to share the finished product on Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. You can also view it on the web. Plus you can copy the embed code. You must publish your product in order to obtain and use the embed code. I used the embed code to place my infographic on this blog.

Other than that one challenge with the colors, the interface is intuitive. You can create an infographic or a chart. For the free account, I actually like the appearance of the charts better. My product (above) includes one infographic, two charts, and one picture (the map). The U.S. Census Bureau provided the data that I used from the 2010 census.  [United States Census Bureau, 2013. 0. <http://www.census.gov/geo/reference/geoguide.html>.] Wikimedia Commons provided the picture of a map.  [http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_USA_showing_regions.png / CC BY-SA 3.0]

 

I found several videos on YouTube that explain how to use Infogr.am. I have listed two that you may find helpful.

So, what data can you make more interesting for your students? And how can they use infographics to make their presentations more interesting?

CREDITS
Graphics created with Infogr.am by Jo Schiffbauer
Posted by at
Labels: ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)