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Using Infogram in the Classroom

11.02.2015 by roberts
by Elizabeth Kahn
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Elizabeth Kahn

The library where I work is housed at Patrick F. Taylor Science and Technology Academy which is a school in a large suburban public school district near New Orleans, LA, USA. The school’s mission is to provide an academically rigorous education with a focus on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Taylor serves students in grades 6th-12th who must meet academic standards to be admitted and live throughout the school district. All students are given a school-issued laptop, and teachers are expected to integrate digital literacy within their lessons.

One aspect of our school that is quite unique is that the students receive assessment and grades on seven school-wide learning outcomes (SWLO) including: communication both oral and written, content, critical thinking, collaboration, work ethic, and technology skills.

Why to use Infogram?

The teachers have established that using tools like Infogram give them an easy way to assess students in many of the SWLOs. An infographic takes critical thinking to decide what information will be added and how that information will be illustrated. Many times the students are working as a team and collaboration is key. There is always some type of written component and very often the students must present their infographic to the class in an oral presentation. Of course it also takes some technology know how to make a product.

When teachers have asked students to create an infographic, the infographic is the product that students create either after learning is done to show what they know or after the students conduct research to show the results of the new information that the students found.

The younger students who are 11 years old can manipulate the site just as easily as the older students who are 17 years old.

Zero learning curve

Infogram has a very simple interface that makes the learning curve very short when you first begin to use it. Sometimes the younger students get a bit thrown by the “dummy text” that is inserted until they edit, but they figure that out quickly. One student decided to add a quote, which was not required for the assignment, from Stephen Hawking because the option was available, and she thought it made sense to the assignment. Another chose to add a word cloud for the same reason. Each of these students found the tools on Infogram on their own without any prompting from me or the teacher.

Adding visuals

Some of the infographics that students have created in science include illustrating the difference between physical and chemical change, the geological time periods, and the various environmental issues found with land-use in the United States.

All of these projects required photos. For the experiments with the 6th graders, the teacher took the pictures while the students conducted the various experiments. She uploaded all the photos on Google Drive and shared with the students. That way when they were ready to make their infographic, they would spend more time writing the text and less time dealing with photos. When the students were working on the pre-historic time periods in Earth science, the teacher required them to include twelve photos of various fossils. I suggested the students use Photos for Class for their pictures. This search tool finds photos with a creative commons license, and when you download the picture, the attribution is automatically added to the bottom of the picture. That makes it so easy for the students and looks nice, too. The downloaded pictures are large, but they are easy to resize in Infogram.

It was older students in an advanced placement (AP) class who were using data visualization for land use. These students had more data to include in graphs and charts than the other projects did, but the students were well versed in Excel and had little trouble making their data work in a way that made sense to them and to others viewing it.I realize that some of my students wished that they could manipulate the fonts and font color more and even put images side by side in Infogram.

I see the tool as easy to use and no matter what the students choose to do; the finished product always looks neat and professional.

That is very important to me, and I plan to keep recommending Infogram to the teachers at my school as a viable technology tool to use as evidence for student learning.