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What is an infographic and why should you want to make your own?

Think USA Today’s weather section or, if you are too young to remember a newspaper, consider how Ikea tries to impart lengthy descriptions with just images. Data is especially good content for display via an infographic. What if an Executive Summary had to be written at a third grade reading level? Now you are getting the gist of an infographic.

From Techopedia:

An infographic takes a large amount of information in text or numerical form and then condenses it into a combination of images and text, allowing viewers to quickly grasp the essential insights the data contains. Infographics are not a product of the Web, but the Internet has helped popularize their use as a content medium.

Although some of the slick versions of infographics we view and share via the Internet are produced by graphic designers we do not have to be one to produce a respectable infographic. And what is even better? Our students can produce them as well!

There are several quality free websites which offer you the ability to make your own infographics. I want to share with you the tool I think of as my first choice in creating infographics. I have created infographics for other posts (See my two latest infographic creations: Creating an Infographic for Digital Learning Tools #MOOC and Digital Learning Resources and Netiquette Quest), this post centers on Easl.ly, the tool I used to make those examples, but other notable services are Piktochart and infogr.am are also attractive and easy enough appearing programs.

KQED offers a nice YouTube on the technical steps/relative ease of creating an infographic in easl.ly:

Of course the creative steps to designing an infographic cannot be as easily reviewed. But with the right resources you could soon be on the road to creating your own OR challenge your students with creating an infographic! Kathy Shrock’s Guide to Everything: Infographics is the *ultimate* authoritative collection for educational infographic purposes.

That’s it, now you too can create an infographic! Honest. If you have a twitter handle you can Twitterize Yourself. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Actually you will need to create an account with Visual.ly in addition to having a twitter account.

However, you get a rad infographic based on your tweets like this one of mine: