This year, staff have been given a large booklet of training courses which are a mix of external and internally offered courses, from which teachers have to choose four during the year.
I've been asked to run some of these courses, and did the first one earlier today. I asked earlier in the month for any comments, and am grateful to a few colleagues who responded.
The session was on
how to create an infographic using Piktochart.
Here's the presentation that I used...
I started the session with a bag of Skittles tipped out onto the desk - I've also used mini-boxes of Smarties for this too.
Each sweet was a data point, and had some attributes: colour, flavour etc.
These could be used to group the data, produce graphs, look at distribution etc.
With locational attributes known, they could be plotted onto maps or GIS and the patterns analysed, and reasons for these patterns explored.
The purpose of an infographic is to 'tell the story' of data in a visual way.
We talked about the growing use of infographics on TV news, and in newspapers.
To reinforce this, I have a copy of the book below: '
Dear Data', which tells the story of a year-long correspondence between two friends, with 52 projects exploring personal data. I showed some of the methods that they used to illustrate particular data, such as how often they picked up their mobile phone and why....
There was also a hand-out, which has some basic details on how to set up Piktochart and make a start on using it.
The whole session lasted around an hour.
Thanks to the colleagues who came along...
Piktochart is an infographic generator, which is free to join for both students and staff.
