It's that time to review another cool tool! This time I have gone the infographic route and have used my fifth grade students as resources. The fifth graders past project was drawing planets to scale and coloring them with chalk. They also had to glue the planets on a separate sheet of paper in order from the sun. Here is a sample of their work:
I have many different abilities in my classroom, which is wonderful but means that I have half the class finished and the other half still working. Instead of starting something completely new and causing those who are not finished extra stress, I decided to let the students help me out by researching an infographic maker that they liked. The reason that I wanted them to find an infographic maker was so they could create an infographic about themselves. Which would ultimately help them with our clay lesson of totem spoons. I got the idea of totem spoons from this blog, MY WORK and Play: Student Work-Totem Spoons by Elder Thorkelson. The lesson will be to create a clay spoon that tells a story of their personality and interests, similar to a totem pole.
Back to the research project on infographic makers...
To help the students organize their ideas and discuss their findings with their classmates I created a Google Classroom discussion question:
The list the students came up with were:
- Piktochart
- Canva - to see a great review of this cool tool check out this blog post by SAVvy Art Teacher.
- Venngage
I chose Venngage mainly because it was the favorite of my students and it seemed like the easiest for them to use. Since this was just a trial assignment, I do not have any student work yet. Hopefully I can update you in the future once we have completed the lesson. In the meantime I will show you my experience with it.
Signing up for Venngage is very simple. I appreciated that when the students selected that they were a student, an email was not required nor was the exchange of personal information. It is really rare to find a tool that has a simple sign up process for students. Once on the website, a surplus of templates are available. Some are premium only, but there are still many that are free.
Venngage offers many different options to create exactly what you want. You can choose from infographics, reports, posters, promotions and social media advertisements. Many of these choices are geared for business rather than education, but some can benefit both fields. An example from the social media category is at the top of this blog. This style is found under the blog headers template. It was very simple to make and took me about five minutes to choose my colors, type my words and add the graphics I wanted. If you want to add some flare to your blogs, I highly recommend this tool!
For this lesson, I am going to have my students focus on the infographic category. One advantage of this tool is that it labels each layout on difficulty, which is very beneficial in an elementary classroom. The three options are beginner, intermediate and advanced. I will encourage my students to use the ones marked beginner since this is their first experience with making an infographic. A disadvantage is that there are very few beginner infographic layouts to choose from.
To start my infographic I chose the "Vibrant Infographic" layout. I had some difficulty manipulating the text that came with the layout. I had to delete the given text boxes and add in my own. Fortunately my fifth graders are really advanced when it comes to manipulating technology, but for those who are not as familiar may have some difficulty and frustration. Once I was able to move the text boxes to where I wanted I appreciated the grid lines that appear to ensure centered words to the page and to other items on the page.
After putting the text I wanted into my infographic I started adding my graphics. I founds that the monochromatic icons had a large selection but the graphics that had a lot of colors were a premium feature. Overall I found myself having a difficult time getting my infographic to be exactly how I envisioned it. That could be in part with being a perfectionist. I am looking forward to finding out whether or not my students have more success. Here is the example I am showing my students:
Once I got the hang of all of the tools and figured out all the cool features I liked this tool. If I were to give it a rating on a scale of 1-5 stars, it would get a 3. I think it is a little difficult to use and can cause frustration easily. Check it out for yourself and let me know what your experience was by leaving a comment below!
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