Photo Credit- Alisa Burke
This week’s topic is definitely one of my favorites and something we’ve touched on in previous modules. It was nice to take a deeper dive into the elements and principles of design and think about the ways we (and our students) can incorporate these ideas into our daily lives. And once again, the resources and sites shared continue to be relevant and timely as we move into the end of many units across the school. For the sake of today’s post, I’ll highlight 2 recent infographics that I’ve made for completely different audiences and purposes then talk about another one that I have in the works.
For Kids
In 4th Grade, students are inquiring into aspects of culture for their ‘Who We Are’ unit and will be showcasing their learning in one of 3 ways- a movie, an e-book or an infographic. When preparing for the summative assessment at the beginning of the unit, the teaching team tried to find ways to give students agency while still providing them with exemplars. This was intended to give them a better idea of the way information can be structured and presented to an audience, but also served as a good mentor text for the teachers in their literacy lessons throughout the unit. With the research, notetaking and guided inquiry to facilitate, I offered to take on the creation of student exemplars for the team. Here is the infographic I created using Canva and images taken on a recent trip to Greece:
Infographic created by yours truly
Part of what I love is that embedded in these projects are lots of rich opportunities to teach design principles and empower students to become creators of remixed and original content, hitting on a few of the ISTE Standards for students. This is exciting because I now have more resources to draw from when working with the students in their upcoming lessons because of this COETAIL course. This week and one after our October break will be spent looking at these exemplars through the lens of the designer instead of the writer, and I’m excited to see how they apply it to their own creations. Stay tuned for more on this…
For Adults
Interestingly enough, it’s not just in my work with students that inforgraphics come in handy. Last week, I also created one for the upcoming edtech conference that will be hosted at our elementary campus. Why? Well, because the information on the website was far too text-heavy and needed a little visual makeover. Also, we want to be able to hand out a flyer to potential sponsors and it’s more likely to make an impact if it’s visually appealing instead of just a load of text. And while I still think it’s a bit more text-heavy than it should be, it’s certainly an improvement. Here are the before and after photos of the sponsorship info page:
Coming Soon
One final connection to this week’s topic is an upcoming challenge handed down from my administrative leaders to create an infographic to reflect the experiences of an elementary learner at AISG. This task came in response to a parent coffee hosted last week and the feedback that it would be nice to receive a handout that highlighted the important points from the presentation. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, not exactly. For a few reasons. First, here are the points they would like included:
PYP Framework
Standards-Aligned Curriculum
Transdisciplinary Learning
ESLR (Expected Student Learning Results)
ATL (Approaches to Learning)
Learner Profile
Concept Driven
Guided Inquiry Model
Innovation & Technology
Social & Emotional Learning
Second, this is my first time in a PYP school and I’m still learning what many of these even are let alone how they are experienced by students in our school context. And finally, how on earth can I come up with visual representations and corresponding text that captures all of this but still fits on a piece of A4 paper and doesn’t scramble your brain with the amount information presented? Please send help suggestions!