5 Infographic Tools for the Classroom

Infographics can be a great tool for teaching and learning. As they are an increasingly popular method for expressing data online, they are very readable by students. You may consider presenting information to students via infographics, or have students create their own infographics for projects that are dealing with data.

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Infographics can liven up your own slide decks, and also your syllabus. Here is an example of a Biology syllabus in the form of an infographic, and here is an example of an English syllabus as an infographic. The use of pie charts make it easy for students to readily understand how they are being assessed. 

For students, infographics can prove to be a creative way of expressing data. Rather than put together a database, students can use icons to represent numbers of people, and really work to make the information easy to understand. Infographic projects need not be limited to Economics, Math, and the Sciences, here is an example infographic for a Classics course, illustrating Death in the Illiad. 

To try out each of these tools, I worked with data from IMDB on Federico Fellini's filmography. I used data about his writing vs. directing production, the years his films came out, the cast he worked with across films and decades, and the gender breakdowns of his cast, and thus his characters. Hopefully this can give you an idea of the many ways you can approach data points in a visual way, in turn aiding yours and your students' research. 

Here are some free tools to get you started with infographics:

• Infogram helps you to create interactive infographics. First, you will need to create an account, and then you can get going with a number of free designs. Infogram helps you to create various charts (including stand-alone charts), and will let you import images and include text. A lot of the features are only available to paid members, including being able to manipulate text in any way (color, font, size), but the tradeoff is that you or your students are able to build a quick, easy and interactive infographic. All free infographics you create with Infogram will have an Infogram watermark. At the very bottom of this post I have embedded the infographic I made through Infogram. And here is a screenshot to show you how easy it is to add visual blocks:

Infogram interface

• Easelly is another fast tool to create infographics. This does not require a signup, so you can get started right away with one of the free layout designs, which you are able to download your static infographic once you're all done. Most of the icons are not available for free, but you can upload your own images, and there are no Easelly watermarks placed on your designs. Here is an example of a timeline infographic I made of Fellini's feature narrative films from the '60s and '70s:

Example created with Easelly

Example created with Piktochart

• Canva, though not strictly a infogram tool, has a lot of icons available for free that you can use for infographics. This design tool I find to be very intuitive, and has a built-in search functionality to help you find appropriate icons and other images. This also lets you download all of your creations, and has built-in sizes for use across social media platforms. There are no watermarks put onto your designs, and the pay structure is like a free app with pay-as-you-go features, if you really must have a particular image on your design. 

• Piktochart is the infographic online tool used by the two syllabus examples I linked to above. I found this to be quite similar to Canva, but not as intuitive, and with a less-robust search function. However, it is more natively designed for infographics, and has some guides for designers who may be intended to create print materials (you would need a paid account to download high-quality image files). Free accounts also include a Piktochart logo on the bottom of your files.
  

• Venngage offers an expansive library of icons that can easily modified with data. Rather than working with spreadsheets, as with Infogram, the manipulation of data in Venngage seems much more native to infographics. The free version of Venngage is limited to publishing your infograms and therefore sharing publicly (downloads or private sharing is only available for paid users). Still, this is a well-organized and fairly intuitive tool that can make attractive-looking infographics without much difficulty. Here is a screenshot of the interface showing how to manipulate icons without use of a spreadsheet:

Venngage interface

If you are working with students who are already well-versed with design, and you have access to it, Adobe Illustrator offers the most robust platform for creating infographics. Students who are web developers or programers would also be capable of designing and implementing interactive infographics from scratch.

Whether you choose to use the free web interfaces or work on something in an offline program, there are many free icons available with creative commons licensing online, which can be brought right into some of the tools above.