Thing 24: Infographics

I really enjoyed working on this particular Thing, though I did find it somewhat intimidating. Learning about infographics has been on my to-do list for at least a year, and I love to study infographics whenever they pop up in my RSS feed. Still, I've been a bit overwhelmed. What data should I use? How should I represent it? What tool, what color scheme, graphics, and font should I choose?  I've looked at a bunch of infographic tools, and went with Piktochart pretty much on a whim. It was easy to learn and had a nice variety of graphics, backgrounds and fonts.

I poked around at various data sets (US government education statistics, NY State DEC endangered animal data) before I decided to keep it simple and work with some mostly true data from my own library to make a mockup of a year-end report. I didn't have exact numbers at hand, but I have a pretty good memory for circulation statistics and purchases, so I know I got those numbers in the ballpark (and yes, my circulation numbers really did skyrocket that much! Yay!).  This was just the right amount of information to get my feet wet--I needed something without complex levels of information for a starter project.

As I worked on this project, I thought about potential pitfalls of using infographics with students. I would love to figure out a really easy tool to use with younger students (maybe just Google Docs?), and I think that I would only attempt something like Piktochart with 7th or 8th grade students for a number of reasons. First of all, deciding on data (even with a defined project) and how to present it visually is a huge challenge--what numbers do you pick? What's the best format for representing it--a chart or graph or text frame? How many images do you use, and at what point do you have too many (because students almost always go in the direction of too many rather than too few!)? How do you keep the flow of information clear and understandable? Can you construct an infographic so that a casual viewer can get your point immediately? There's also the issue of making sure that your content matches those spiffy graphics--some careful editing and proofreading would be necessary! Yikes--these are some high level skills and I would need to make sure that the classroom teacher and I had really put our heads together and had clear ideas and expectations before we could launch into an infographic project. That said, I sure would like to hook the 8th grade math teacher for something like this--I rarely collaborate with the math department and this would be a good prospect. I could also see it as a good fit for the 8th grade periodic table research project--students have a pretty focused task in that project and this might be a good way to represent their findings.

For younger students, I would have to do a ton of research and practice before I felt confident with rolling out infographics. I could see doing something simple with the upcoming 2nd grade project on our community--we could do some basic visual representations of demographic information, for example. 

I loved that this task stretched my brain and got me out of my comfort zone a bit. I think I could spend a lot of time playing around with infographics--now I just need to convince a teacher to take the plunge!