Infographics

Okay y'all, I managed to survive the last week of school - barely.  If you're struggling to get through, ask me about the the curse word coloring book that got handed in to admin. this week.  I imagine you'd get a chuckle out of it.  Honestly, I'll miss those kids, but with only a work day on Monday, I can almost taste freedom.  If you were to look inside my brain right now, you'd see "just one more day" repeated a million times over.  I know you can relate.

That having been said, it's been hard to buckle down and focus on this week's sandbox.  I can't tell you how tempted I was to just throw something together on Piktochart, and call it a day.  I've used that tool several times in the past, and although I wouldn't say it's intuitive, it was easy for me to pick up after playing with it for a while.  There are some pretty cool features as well, so if you get the chance to check it out (maybe after the 2016-17 school year is in the rear-view), you definitely should.

After checking out the 5 Great Online Tools for Creating Infographics, I decided to try Canva.  First impressions: easy to navigate, lots of design templates, great support features.  I scrolled down until I found infographic templates, and started looking through their design templates.  I was impressed by the number of options, and by the quality of those options.  I started putting an infographic together, but was immediately frustrated by the lack of free images for use.  Each time I found an image that I liked, there was a price tag beneath it.  I used the images anyway, because after checking out Easel.ly, I liked Canva better.

I thought that Canva was easy to use and I could see my students being able to pick it up pretty easily. The lack of free images to choose from would be frustrating, but the watermarks on premium content aren't as distracting as I originally feared.

Of the three platforms that were discussed in Sandbox, I think Piktochart has the most potential to be useful in a classroom or library.