Make Your Own Infographic

collaborative online class project using Canva

Infographics are such a great teaching resource, and to my delight I discovered that Canva.com offer a free online tool for creating your own infographics. For my previous blog I shared lesson materials on Skateboarding where I included a video comprehension on the history of skateboarding with an infographic based on that video which I made myself. It was the first time I’d ever made an infographic and proved to be both a straightforward and an interesting process; taking information from the video and editing it into short text summaries, finding appropriate images, then formatting with colours and fonts.

I found Canva.com easy to use and enjoyed the creative process so I felt that it could be a great activity to do with a group of students, as long as they were fairly competent at using digital tools, which nowadays is a requirement for many teachers and students alike.

As well as making an interesting and creative collaborative project, once the students have tried out this software, and if they enjoy it, the same process can be used for future projects on whichever topics you go on to cover and having tried it once, they may feel confident to do the next one on their own.

I fully recommend you get to know this infographic resource if you don’t already, and have a go at using it, especially if, like me, you write your own teaching materials. Now that I’ve tried it, I’m sure I’ll be making more infographics in future.

Another top recommendation is Nik Peachey’s website (and blog) https://peacheypublications.com/ which offers more ideas on how to use infographics in lessons amongst many other excellent creative resources as well as information on the latest digital teaching tools.

Project Resources

The project is aimed at Intermediate+ level online students (or class where students have access to computers and internet) and will require between 4-6 hours of lesson/homework time. The lesson plan (four lessons of 1 hour) has details on how to prepare for the project, including a YouTube playlist with an interesting selection of TED-Ed short animated “history of” videos that can be used as the source of information for the infographic.

The idea is that students use English throughout the collaborative process when working as a group and to this end you may wish to prepare and focus them on the sort of language they should use in advance of the project. For this purpose you can prepare the students in advance of the project with the Language for Collaboration vocabulary document and the Dialogue cards for practice.

The Skateboarding video lesson with infographic could also be a good way to introduce the idea of how to take information from a short video and condense it into short texts for an infographic.

There are three student handouts. The first is a set of guidelines for creating a good Infographic. Then there is an infographic for Collaboration Strategies. Finally there is the student handout infographic with the steps the students need to follow during the project.

Download complete project resources file here:

Previous Blog Posts

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