Infographics

       When I first started looking around at infographics, I thought 'cool, but how can I use this in my library?' But the more I explored and read about the use of infographics in education, the more I recognized the potential of this unique, user-friendly medium for representing information. One of my first thoughts was for the GT students in my district who are required each year to do a project. These students are often sent to the library for help with their project and this might be a fresh new way for these students to demonstrate understanding of their given topic.
       I also love the idea of making a cool graphic to represent data for students. If I wanted a creative way to show students how to do self-checkout, I can see that an infographic would be better than a standard list (that they will ignore anyway). As I started considering what my first infographic would be, I remembered a list sent to all librarians in my district about reminding teachers what we can do for them. I decided to take this list and create an infographic with that same information.

      I took the information from the list made by our Information Services department and added some of the educational technology resources our district has available. Teachers often forget about some of the e-book programs we use and I felt this would make for a great reminder. 

     

Easel.ly

I really wanted to like Easel.ly because I liked the themes it had available and after spending about an hour using it, I wanted to come away from it with a usable product. Unfortunately, I found it to be slightly cumbersome and after getting frustrated with resizing and moving objects around, I gave up. I did like the tools that Easel.ly offered and the layout of it's site, but it wasn't perfect. I tend to be a bit of a perfectionist, wanting everything to be centered and I found that the formatting didn't always allow for that. 

Infogr.am
I did not spend a large amount of time playing around on Infogr.am because it honestly did not make a great impression on me. I watched several videos on YouTube for each of the three sites we were asked to review and they all seem to have the same functionality. Infogr.am's templates were all line graphs and since that was not how I wanted my information represented, I decided this was not the site for me.

Piktochart
After playing around on Easel.ly and struggling with some of the formatting, I was relieved to find the functionality of piktochart to be so user friendly. The tools are quite intuitive and I was impressed with how easy all of the features are. There are many templates to choose from and the huge amount of images, shapes and graphics available is ultimately what won me over. The entire site worked logically and would be great to use with students.