Image from Visualistan.com

Challenging Your Students to Support Their Arguments with Data

@joe_edtech / @LisaBerghoff

As I was planning this blog post I had to keep searching through my previously published topics. I couldn't believe that I hadn't written about infographics before - at least once. So this is long overdue.

The STEAM philosophy in education is not the preference for certain content areas in the curriculum - don't get hung up on the acronym. STEAM is about teaching our kids to think creatively, in an interdisciplinary way. Student created infographics is an easy way to integrate STEAM ideas in any content area. When kids make good infographics, they learn to construct a coherent argument, supported by graphical representations of both quantitative and qualitative data, designed in a way that is both pleasing and convincing.

Honestly, your students could make good infographics on their own using Google Docs or Microsoft Word, but there are some pretty decent infographic generators out there in the Web 2.0 world. The three that I've seen used most effectively in the classroom are Venngage, Visme, and infogr.am. All of them work pretty much the same way, and all of them have a few drawbacks. For instance, all of them fall into the category of free-ish. They all have premium versions that have far more features and options than the free for education versions, but they all have templates and examples to help your students as they work.

Venngage has actually added more features to its free products in the last year, so let's start there. Here is the short Venngage introduction to their product:

As you can see, there are many more templates available for the premium version, but there is plenty available with your free account.

Visme is another infographic generator that is easy to use and offers several templates for free, however, Visme only allows you to keep 3 infographics in your free account at any one time. infogr.am is not just an infographic generator. It also allows you to create maps and graphs. However, infogr.am is really built around its premium service. The "free" plan restricts users to 10 infographics, and also restricts the number of image uploads. 

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Have you found other ways to create good infographics in the classroom? Please tell us about them in the comment box below.