Infoedugraphic

Hello ladies and gentlemen!!

I’m glad to show you my last ICT project... This time, we have made a group work so first of all, I would like to introduce my classmates since without them, this InfoEdugraphic wouldn’t have been possible! The members of the group are María, Celia, Estrella, Gonzalo and I. 

To do our Infoedugraphic, which iis basically a graphic representation of some information, done with an informatic tool (such as Easel.ly, Picktochart, Thinglink or Canva) we surfed the InfoEduGraphic Project Site to look for tips, instructions and ideas.

What about the topic? Well... as you can verify [Planets in the Solar System (mine), TheHydrosphere (by Gonzalo), Environmental care (by Estrella), The Mysteries of the Earth (by María) and Landcaping (by Celia)] all our individual e-projects are connected with Social Science. That´s the reason why we have decided to make an Infoedugraphic as an introductory tool about the Universe, the Solar System and the Earth, which has so many amazing features that we have called it "The Magic Planet". Our main learning outcome is for our students to know about the planets of the Solar System, The Earth’s layers (Hydrosphere, Atmosphere and Geosphere), its landforms, as well as environmental care.

Before going on with the task, the roles were asigned:

• Estrella was the coordinator. She had to direct and check that each member did his part of the job. She also encouraged us to keep working on the infographic. She did her work perfectly and she knew how to motivate us at each moment!

• Celia was the speaker, who is in charge of spreading the work and representing the team when it’s needed. She also did his work in a perfect way! She represented all our ideas and issues to our teacher María Jesús.

• Gonzalo was the supervisor and he was in charge of controlling the creation process and remembering each person’s task. They also had to take notes of everybody’s ideas. He wrote all the steps we followed and at the end, we could made a little feedback in order to identify the good things done and other things we could improved.

• Finally my peer María and I were the secretaries. We made and created the InfoEduGraphic using Picktochart and Thinglink.

 
Once that each member had clear their function, we had to decide the tool. As it was said before, we chose Piktochart due to the fact that some members of our group had already used it and they said that it could fit the purpose of the project perfectly. Piktochart gives you the possibility to create infographics, posters, presentations or reports depending on what you need. The quality of its pictures and icons is quite high and very attractive, exactly what we were looking for: to captivate students’ attention. However, we also had to face some problems:

•  Firstly, how to link all our e-projects’ contents. After thinking about it for a while, we decided to structure the infoedugraphic from the most abstract content (the space) to the most concrete one (landforms). That’s how it is structured in the national curriculum according to the different educational grades. This way, we could include all our Social Science curricular contents in a structured and well-organized way. In order to motivate them, we added a badge that they could get once they finished the learning process.
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•  Secondly, we thought about how to adapt the contents to the different school’s levels: this challenge was harder to face, but finally we thought of making an interactive InfoEduGraphic. What does this mean? We did not only an infographic (which is an image) but also an interactive image. By doing this, we foster an active learning and allow students of different grades to access to different activities of different difficulty according to the content. Throughout this project pupils will have a more active role whereas the teacher will act as a guide. Inductive learning is also part of the learning process that we wager. 
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• Finally, we would like to highlight that Piktochart would be perfect if it offered the possibility of making those graphics interactives (pictures with movements, sounds, to link to other webpages and so on) instead of being just an image.

Once we had our infographic finished, we went to make it interactive to promote and active learning and to increase pupils’ motivation. We did this part of the project using the online tool Thing Link. With this tool, you can make an interactive image by putting links in small spots inside your picture. Therefore, we included a video to expand knowledge, interactive activities to review each content and an Arts and Crafts activity about environmental care.
For all these things before mentioned, this tool is incredibly useful to create your own CLIL materials since, by linking resources, you can work the 4Cs. However, we think this tool would be nicer if it offered a wider variety of forms to insert the links, not only spots.

To conclude, we can say that Infographics have a lot of uses in our classrooms: they can be used to introduce a specific content, to review key vocabulary, to explain the steps of a process or activity, to help children with special educational needs... Infographics present information in a neat and visual way, that can clarify students’ doubts. Moreover, students can also create their own infographics in order to learn about content and ICT skills.
 
Our final artifact is this amazing interactive InfoEduGraphic. Click on the spots to see the activities and enjoy it!!
 


See you soon!!