For my mini multi-modal composition project, I created the infographic seen to the left (click to enlarge). It's a series preview of this weekend's baseball series between the Milwaukee Brewers and the Pittsburgh Pirates. I had a lot of fun doing it, and it's something I may actually think about doing some more work with to add to my repertoire in my professional life as a Brewers writer.I used the website Piktochart to create this infographic, and the first hour or so of my work on this was dedicating to playing around a bit with my options and trying to figure out how everything worked. There's a whole deeper world in this site's box of tools to explore that I didn't even begin to dig into, but I certainly plan to go back for more.
To save myself some time and headache, I started with one of the site's pre-made templates, this one was called "Coffee vs. Tea". I took out all the elements that referred to the two beverages, switched around some of the colors (it still has an overall earthy tone that I'm decided is the outfield grass, but really I just couldn't figure out how to adjust the background color), and got to work.
For explanation of what's all included here, the graph shows both team's league rankings in offense, pitching and defense, followed by the weekend's probable starting pitchers. Below those are the team's records, shown graphically. I think added a fun fact at the bottom, along with a source to credit baseball-reference.com.
I think this kind of activity has a lot of uses in the classroom. From one perspective, I can use this to create infographics to support my lessons that students will find interesting. Then of course, I can also have students create their own infographics to show what they have learned in an interesting and fun way.
as a (mildly reluctant) Brewers fan, I thought this image was super neat. The colors are nice and remind me a bit of an actual scoreboard at a baseball game. People underestimate the use of images, but they are very important. Images like yours allow readers to get a quick look at the current situation in an easy to read format, just like it's a lot easier to see how people voted based on a map than an excel worksheet. And I agree, they're also super fun to make, which could help keep kids interested in learning.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you found something you'll continue to use in your Brewers writing. I did the same thing with the Piktochart and plan on using it for work! Yours looks better though. Well done! I think this actually would be a really cool tool to use in the classroom because it gets you interested and forces you to do some research.
ReplyDeleteYour infographic is an excellent example of compare and contrast writing, which one of the many teaching responsibilities we have as English teachers.
ReplyDeleteThe link below provides 7 different ways to use infographics in the English classroom
http://larissaslanguages.blogspot.it/2014/01/7-ways-to-use-infographics-in-english.html?m=1