Inforgraphics Made Easy

Easel.ly not only provides students with easy to create inforgraphics perfect for the classroom, it also provides teachers a very handy e-book guide. The guide shows teachers how to set up groups for students to login without providing an email address. All you have to do is create a login and they send you a link.

Additional tips and ideas:

• Have students start with a template if they have not had infographic-making experience
  
• There is already a place to insert a list of resources. My favorite resource for students to create MLA format is Purdue's OWL Lab.*
• Encourage students to link images and information back to their source material 
• Because students can get bogged down altering the aesthetics, create a classroom procedure of needing teacher approval before playing with color schemes and extras
• Because some tech- and content-savvy students finish early, I like to offer lesson add-ons for students. These are challenges for students to take and incorporate into their projects. It gives students another skill, keeps them engaged, and won't result in kids trying to rush through their work to get the opportunity to play a computer game. These are sort of like those 5 minute filler lessons that we teachers have when a class finishes a lesson early, but individualized. A great add-on for Easel.ly is asking students to Blabberize on of their images. They create the Blabberize and then hyperlink the image on the Easel.ly to the Blabberize. Students could also create a Vocaroo to hyperlink. 

*I know that many people like Easy Bib or Citation Machine, but I find that students tend to still have errors in their bibliographies AND no understanding of how to read the information in the bibliography. If I want my students to be able to use bibliographies as readers, I have to teach them how to write them. I would personally rather a student make an error in a bibliography entry they wrote than an error is one from Easy Bib. Just my two cents for my middle school ELA classroom.