We all love a good picture book. Even the most avid of readers can get overwhelmed by a wordy explanation in her text book and appreciates a good graphic now and then. We teach our students to highlight main ideas with bright markers and color-code their notes because we know that colors stick in our brains and help us remember things. Sometimes we even draw little pictures, or circles, or arrows pointing to the most important information in our books. There is no question that color and pictures support our understanding and memory of information.
Enter, the infographic.
I'm sure you've seen these popping up all over the place lately. I've learned all kinds of fun new facts about the difference between nerds and geeks and what's in my coffee. There's even an infographic to help me know if I'm wearing pants!
The infographic posted above is one that I created using easel.ly. As the site's name suggests, it was super easy! It took a little time to get the design just how I wanted and find just the right graphics to support my goal, but easel.ly made putting my design thoughts onto paper easy peasy;) I had this infographic printed out poster-size to hang on the wall in our classroom library corner.
Infographics are also a great project for students to create themselves. Like concept maps, infographics allow students to collect and highlight main ideas within a concept. This project is fun for your visually-oriented and/or artsy students:)
I try to support my lessons with visual aids every chance I get. Infographics are a fun way to do this, but I also like to use real-life photos. Using photo-editing tools like Picasa allows me to enhance and highlight photographs to support student learning. I like to use real-world photos (as opposed to graphics) when I can because students can connect through and relate to photographs of real places and people in ways that they cannot with computer graphics.
How do you use graphics and photos in your classroom? Do you use these tools more as teaching tools or do you have your students use them for projects?
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