I knew I wanted to try my hand at creating an infographic, as others have already done using Piktochart. I thought I’d try out a different program for comparison purposes. In my research I found a web site that provided a list of likely candidates (edudemic.com), which also provided a few very interesting links on assessment and learning – “13 Reasons Your Brain Craves Infographics” by Jeff Dunn (13 June 2013). With such a title, and given this week’s chapter assignment, “The Nature of Learning,” this seemed a -- ahem – no-brainer.

The New Learning book in particular seems to lend itself to such a visual representation.

Easel.ly is another infographic creation program (free) found on the web. Thanks to the aforementioned article, I learned there are interactive infographics out there too, and even though these visual concept summary tools usually cater to mass consumption (at least, according to Dunn), I thought of how this reaffirms the theory that our brains’ learning mechanisms are “social” (Kalantzis and Cope), whether online or in f2f classrooms.

I do think the Easel.ly program may be less versatile than Piktochart. I noticed the canvas on which I created this infogram seemed small, and while I did use  template based on its division into four areas (to match the four dimensions organizing the chapter’s contents), this just didn’t seem as visually informative a space as the Piktochart I’ve seen others use.

However, it did allow me to import images, not just use the “canned” images included. The text/image creation tools were a bit inflexible. For example, if I wanted to change font colors in a bullet list, I found I would have to create an entirely separate text box for that part. Change the font color for one letter, change it for all.