Learning About Infographics at TLTS 2014

Another outstanding partnership between the eLearning Consortium of Colorado (eLCC) and Metro

State University resulted in this year's Teaching and Learning with Technology Symposium. The event was well organized and well attended. And there was ample parking across the street from the event center. Awesome!

Normandy Roden and Travis Chillemi of the U. Colorado System provided one of the symposium highlights with their session titled "1,000 Words are Worth a Picture: Infographics to Enhance Teaching and Learning". Visual learners depend on  charts, graphs, and images for providing meaning to large amounts of information. Infographics can also be included in this toolbox of information conveyers. Giving a visual learner a well laid out infographic makes them a happy camper.

Infographics types and examples

The session began with an overview of infograph types including guides, step-by-step, decision trees, simple and complex timelines, and simple and complex data visualizations. An example of an historically significant infographic was the publication in 1862 of a complex timeline of Napolean's march on Moscow, pictured at the top of this post.

A more modern infographic example is the word cloud, sometimes known as tag clouds or wordles. Word clouds use block of texts that are represented by a word chart. The greater the frequency of the word in the text block, the larger the word appears in the graphic.



Creating infographics

Infographics can be created using a number of programs including MS Word, Wordle, Adobe Illustrator, and similar. PiktoChart  was specifically mentioned as an easy to use program. The free version is available but limited in the number of available templates and graphics. The Pro version, at $40/year, was a highly recommended option.