A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words
The assignment for this portion of class was to read, The Psychological Impact of Infographics in Education (Huseyin Bicen & Mobina Beheshti, 2017 and yes I do realize that is not the correct format for citing but I don't really care). The reason I'm including it in my review is because of the research they cite from 2014, "infographics can be used as an alternative tool and also make students be able to illustrate their highest achievements in education". I think that concept is pretty cool, having students show, depict, exhibit, explain ..... what they've learned! And let's face it, visuals have been around for a long, long, time. Just take a look at the cave paintings in Lascaux France.
With that in mind I created a quick infographic using Canva. It's my go to tool for so many things at school. From posters, to creating original background images for our newsletter, I could not live without it. "
Canva for Education is available 100% free globally to all qualified teachers, schools, and educational institutions."
I had not used any of the infographic templates before so I was interested to see what is available. There are oer 1,000 templates and interestingly they all appear under the "Marketing Tab".
I think one of the hardest things to think about is what is the actual purpose of the infographic. In this case I decided to do something fairly straight forward: a timeline of what the Library has accomplished since Spring 2020 to the present.
The image on the left is the template that I selected. I modified it for my content, adding another object at the bottom and changed the color scheme.
I added the object on the left side because I think it creates additional visual interest, moving the eye from left to right which is a natural eye pattern and I modified the color scheme because I wanted to end in YELLOW for to represent/imitate the "yellow brick road" found in Oz (the Wizard of Oz author, L. Frank Baum was originally from Chittenango).
The beauty of Canva is that you can customise ANYTHING from colors, images, background to size! For me it's like buying clothes that say "one size fits all". I experimented with the color pallet because I wanted to get more of the yellow brick road pallet and I could customize it completely.
My ratings for this tool are:
Last but not least, here's a quick video: