Infographics - cool stuff

I dipped my toe into the waters of infographics.  It was kinda scary.  I'm sure you're like me in that you have seen more and more infographics popping up everywhere.  I do like them because they are a great way to see information and get to the meat of things quickly.  In fact my husband had his resume made into an infographic in 2013 when he was looking for a new job.  I think as more and more information is available to us we will need these infographics to take it all in.  As I was perusing different infographic creating websites I decide to contact my friend Randy Krum of Cool Infographics.  I asked him if he could direct me to some of the best sites for someone starting out and he referred me to his website www.coolinfographics.com.  On his site he had an article on 5 infographic sites and his thoughts on them.  I have included it here 5 Infographic Sites - Review.  After playing with some I went with one I made on Easel.ly and will give my thoughts on it's use.

I used Pew Research and found an article about how people grade and use libraries and thought it was pretty interesting.  It was presented in a slide and as I looked at it I decided what I felt was important an needed to be highlighted.  I then used this information to create an infographic on Easel.ly and voila an infographic was born.

I liked using Easel.ly except for a few things.  I am a neat freak and could not get some of the graphics to line up exactly like I wanted them to. It did give guide lines, but it was hard to see what was lining up.  It also doesn't give a ton of graphics without paying for a subscription, but I was able to create something from a pre-made template and change the information pretty easily.  I pretty much just double clicked on the text and it opened a text box that I could then change the information in.  When I looked for new graphics I would just click and drag them onto the page and it would then let me reformat them to the size I wanted.  I could do the same for text boxes and charts.  There is also a draw tool, but I didn't use it.   I could change colors of the background, graphics, etc.  I was able to create a link to my infographic and I can also embed it.  There is also an option to create a pdf, which is pretty useful.

Overall, I enjoyed making an infographic and can see myself using this again.  I think this next year I am going to try using it with my 8th grade students.  They can probably show me a thing or two after they use it!

          How People Use Libraries