Creating Infographics in the Elementary Classroom

Infographics are a great way to display information and corresponding data. Ever since seeing a presentation by Kathy Schrock at METC last year, I have been eager to learn more about infographics and how they could be incorporated into the classroom. Creating a quality infographic is a higher order thinking activity. Students have to collect data, research and find corresponding data, bring together these data sources and combine them into one visually appealing infographic. This synthesizing of information makes infographics a high-quality assessment for students.

Being more comfortable with infographics, I started to work on how I could integrate this into the elementary classroom. Infographics could be incorporated into math class when working on graphing, science class when students are reporting data from an experiment, or in any other subject where a lot of data or knowledge needs to be condensed into just the essentials. All of these tasks fit into the elementary classroom curriculum.

With curriculular ties in place, I then started to look for the best programs to use. After looking at online resources such as Piktochart, I actually think Microsoft Publisher and SMART Notebook 11 are great programs for elementary students to use when creating infographics because...

• They already know how to use them so there is no technology learning curve (this is the case in many of my buildings)
• each program can export out to image files
• graphs can be copy and pasted from Excel with ease
• each program allows students to move and insert objects anywhere on the page
• both programs have their own clip art to use in addition to images from the web.

Here is a short demonstration for using Microsoft Publisher to create infographics.

Here is a short demonstration for using SMART Notebook 11 to create an infographic.

Infographics seem to be everywhere so it is time to see them in the classroom as well. The benefits of being able to research and collect information and then turn it into an informational graphic, provides students with a real world, higher order thinking task. Give it a try in your classroom today!