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This is just a short post to anounce the publication of my new ebook ' Exploiting Infographics for Digital Literacy and Critical Thinking '. Exploiting Infographics follows on from 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy , which is a collection of lesson plans based around infographics, and looks in more depth at the genre and how infographics can be used as both sources of information and as creative learning tasks for students. The tasks that accompany the infographics are intended to encourage students to think more critically about the information they are exposed to and to question the sources of information they find whilst browsing the internet. Exploiting Infographics should help teachers to start creating their own tasks, activities and lesson plans for students and to integrate infographics in a way that will enhance students’ critical thinking, digital literacy, language and communication skills. Exploiting Infographics was conceived as part of The Digital Classrooms Serie...

I recently revisited Phraseum , an app which I first discovered and reviewed in March 2014. I’m glad to see that the tool is still around, has gathered a loyal following and has developed both in terms of design and functionality since that first review . In this article I’d like to show you some of the new features and also share some ideas for how you can use it. Let me start though by recapping what Phraseum does. Phraseum is a tool that students can use to capture lexical chunks, collocations and expressions while they read online text. It helps students to collect these expressions into theme based phrasebooks that they can then use to revise and share their learning.  Within the platform there are also a number of features to help them learn the phrases, these include tagging of phrases and links through to Google translate. Phraseum also records the source of the phrase so that students can go back and find the phrases in their context.  A new feature that’s been ...

I’ve been a long term advocate of the use of infographics in education and especially enjoy thinking of ways that students can be encouraged to engage with and question the content as well as create their own graphics, so when I rediscovered Visme.co I was really delighted to find the tool that I once thought was a PowerPoint substitute for creating online presentations had turned into an awesome interactive infographic creator. What’s so impressive about Visme? I’ve used quite a few infographic creation tools and most are either template based or they have a library of assets which you can drag and drop to construct your own layouts. Visme.co offers a combination of both these options along with the possibility to animate the elements within the graphic, drop in your own images or online videos and also embed html elements such as polls and quizzes into the graphic. This enables your infographic to be more than just data display, they can act as multimedia tools to encourage user re...

Infographics are a great source of information and make reading information from the computer screen much easier, but just showing students an infographic and telling them to study it isn’t the most effective way to exploit the medium. Creating your own infographic tasks can be time consuming though, so in this posting I’m presenting a number of generic ideas that should work with a number of types of infographic. You can use these ideas with students to help focus their comprehension of the information and give them clear goals for engaging with the information in the graphics. Peer created questions Give your students an infographic and get them to create a quiz based around it. Once the students have created their quiz they can use it to check the comprehension or knowledge of other students in their class. You can make this competitive and have teams to quiz each other. You could also have different infographics for each group and they can exchange questions and infographics. This ...

On the surface Riddle is a great free tool for creating a variety of quizzes and polls that can have rich media embedded into them, but when you look below the surface it's actually a pretty sophisticated tool for quickly authoring engaging elearning. Creating a Riddle is easy Go to: http://www.riddle.com and sign up. Then you will see the different quiz types. The main types of interactions you can create are: Opinion polls - These are simple single question polls which can contain a number of fixed response for the recipient to choose from. Lists - Lists aren’t questions as such, they are more like a nice way of presenting information in a series of chunks. Each chunk of information can also have media or text embedded into it. This would make a great way of presenting infographic type information in a more mobile friendly way. Pop quiz - A pop quiz can contain a number of multiple choice questions. Pop quizzes can be scored across percentage of correct answers. Students can...

Draw.io is one of my favourite tools and the one I use most for creating graphics and infographics. As someone who doesn’t draw very well and has only limited design abilities it has really helped me out a number of times and enabled me to produce professional looking illustrations, product mockups and teaching materials. How it works When you go to the Draw.io site you can either open an existing diagram or create a new one. Click on Create New Diagram and you will have the option to either choose from a number of templates that you can edit or use a blank template. Once you open a blank template you see the canvas in the centre and on the left of the screen there are a number of shapes and a search engine. If you scroll down the categories on the left and click on them you’ll see a vast range of shapes images and icons any of which you can use by simply dragging them onto the canvas. The canvas appears to be A4, but to can drop images and shapes anywhere around it and it will expan...

AnswerGarden is a very simple tool for creating short answer polls and displaying the answers as word clouds. It’s really simple and quick to use and can be used in the classroom or embedded into webpages, blogs or in online courses. To create an AnswerGarden poll just go to http://answergarden.ch and click on the + sign at the top. Then you can either type in a topic to brainstorm or a question. AnswerGarden poll responses are limited to either 20 or 40 characters so be sure that the type of question you use doesn’t require a long complex answer. AnswerGarden works best when only a single word answer is required. Once you have added your topic or question you can just click enter and your poll will be ready. Then just share the URL with the recipients. You can refine your poll and add some security to it if you wish. There are a number of modes you can choose for your poll. You can allow different users to repeat the same answer, in which case the repeated word will appear larger d...