Student Infographics Come A Long Way!

Source: 6th Grade Students

It's been over ten years since we first started using infographics with our students to make learning visible. They have certainly come a long way! Not only is this due to our ability to redesign aspects of our lessons to promote visual thinking and design, but also because the design tools are so much better. Our go-to creative tool now is Canva. It allows for so many options and templates. This flexibility enables students to make selections and modify their designs to look professional.

Since we use Canva it at multiple grade levels, they continue to perfect their visual literacy skills. The early "linear to visual" infographics using iPads and PicCollage seem so primitive now compared to the variety of selections in Canva. We do still use PicCollage for our Kindergarten through second grade students; it's a perfect tool for introducing our younger students to the art of learning and designing infographics.

Source: 6th Grade Students

Sketchnotes: Pushing Linear To Visual

ASIDE 2017

It’s been a hectic spring, and as we approach the end of school in fewer than 8 days, we are busier than ever. Of late, we’ve had a tendency to overthink what to post, instead of just sharing the many good things that we do with our students to promote making thinking visual. To that end, we thought we’d share in this post some of the sketchnotes that our students completed this year.

ASIDE 2017

One of the things we try to do is steer clear of just filling in worksheets and graphic organizers; instead, we want our learners to design their own organizational structures of information. We did this with our digital citizenship pledge this year. The students visually designed their own pledges. This approach let them focus on the content and create a graphic display of what it means to be a good digital citizen.

ASIDE 2017

Since our students routinely use sketchnotes in a variety of subjects and on multiple grade levels, many of them include visual annotations, or doodles if you will, on their own as reference points. We see it in their notes and sometimes in the margins on an assessment.

A few other unique examples we wanted to share were completed in a lesson about the different types of primary sources. Ask any student about where they can find primary source information, and most will say books and the Internet.

ASIDE 2017

This sketchnote activity opens their eyes to the vast array of places to locate primary documentation and firsthand accounts of information. The examples in this post represent some of the unique ways our learners visually organize how they think about content.

Sketchnotes are used to give context to content, and this design process helps with comprehension and retention of material. It’s one more tool for helping students to make thinking visible.

ASIDE 2017