Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Infographics with Students

Created with easel.ly, my infographic illuminates that some of our immigration decisions in our history have been made based on race and not citizenship.  My infographic is designed to be a mentor text--an example of the three components I am expecting in their work: visuals, content, and knowledge (explained below.)

Immigration_by_Decade title=
easel.ly


My students are currently working on creating something similar. We started the unit by creating lists about the things that fascinated us. I then asked the students to find images and writing about any of their topics of fascination.

The imagery could be artwork, photographs, or even original sketches. The writing could be news articles, magazine essays, excerpts from novels, song lyrics, poetry...a children's book...anything.

The idea was to encourage students to explore and learn beyond an encyclopedia or wikipedia--no offense meant to either of their resources. But I wanted students to understand that we can learn through the experiences of others...and sometimes that included a photograph, a piece of art, a masterpiece of music.

As they create their infographics, I am asking them to keep in mind three things:

  • Visual--the use of graphics, color, theme, or frame of reference should be helpful to the reader, not just cute.
  • Content--the bulk of the graphic should be facts and/or statistics.
  • Knowledge--they need to consider what insight they are presenting by laying out their data all together.

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