Thing 15 Infographics

Infographics: When I first opened Infographics and looked at a number of the samples, they reminded me of miniature posters of factoids surrounding a given topic. Then I tried the search tool looking for topics related to books. Nothing showed up, so I went to the Favorites menu and looked under the heading of Education--and it had more to do with issues surrounding education than with specific educational topics. One Infographic that grabbed my attention was called "The Life of a Cow." As I scanned down the page, I kept thinking that the information was clearly from an advocacy source--partly because I was becoming vaguely uncomfortable about the hamburger I ate last night. Then as I scrolled to the bottom of the page, I found that PETA had sponsored the information.

Overall, I liked the visual approach to presenting information and Infographics' ability to share your findings. That the posters are often accompanied by a long list of resources makes them a natural springboard for student research projects. They might even serve as graphic models for students to present information in much the same way. There's a lot of poster-making in this building.

Beyond that, I'm going to have to do some thinking about how it can be more broadly used.

Visualize Free: This app is the next logical step from Infographics in that it moves from just viewing displays to actually creating them. I played around with this app for longer than I care to admit and took a screen shot of it. Here it is, not that I spent a lot of time on this one image alone . . .