What are infographics?

Infographics are visual displays of any kind of data or information with the aim of presenting complex concepts in an eye-catching, quick and clear way. It can be named differently in some specific contexts: "data visualization" or "information design and architecture", are common names for the same concept. The main purpose of creating an infographic is to aid communication in such a way that student´s attention is drawn to focus on a specific topic.

Visualization is a very powerful tool in the classroom. The teacher may create a lesson around a powerful image related to a specific topic, triggering discussion and reflection around a number of concepts. A different approach is to ask students to create visual representations of complex concepts they should learn. Students will distill large amounts of complex information into a visual representation.

In the internet there are a number of tools that will make this possible, the following is one of the many available for free.

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GAFE is now GSuite

Google Apps for Education has been around for many years now. Undoubtedly it has been the best option for schools to help teachers and students share and learn collaboratively.  According to Google, GSuite is more than a rename, it is more than a makeover, it is a huge step ahead into collaboration, communication and platforms integration.

https://blog.google/topics/education/introducing-g-suite-education/

Being a teacher is sometimes difficult to keep up with all these news coming from Google. It is always a matter of having enough free time to take PD courses, assist to workshops and many other PD activities. So, for those willing to learn about Gsuit taking a self-paced online course might be the best approach. Following this paragraph, I insert the link to a Gsuite website, where you´ll be able to take several self-paced courses. Clic on the next image.

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Free as in "free speech"

This post is a new weekly issue for the #edublogsclub challenge 2017. The challenge is to write a post about a weekly prompt published by Ronnie Burt. The topic for this fifth issue is “Free web tools”. If you would like to read past issues of this challenge, please click on the “Tags” menu (right column) and click on the #Edublogsclub label. You may also access the past issues list here.

This week's invitation is to write about “Free web tools”. I mean, free as in “free beer”, in the sense of costing no money. A quite different point of view is that which refers to as “free speech”, in the sense of having the liberty to express yourself. I took some time during the last four days to ask a number of my fellow colleagues the fooling question, “What do you interpret the following sentence? “Access a comprehensive list of free web tools for teachers”. All of them intuitively answered with some variation of “free beer” version. Only one computer technician mentioned the “free speech” flavor. Following their answers I asked a second and third questions: Who do you think is absorbing the costs of having that app online 24/7? Do you think there could be another reason other than altruism, to absorb those costs?

One of the fellow colleagues I invited to answer the questions above is currently teaching economics. She mentioned this quote:

An interesting quote to denote that those offering free web tools might have other means of profit from it. I am open to the idea that profit might not always be money as a direct result, but I think most of the times it boils down to it. The user access the web app being offered, the provider places some ads, and the advertiser pays for every click the user did on the ad. Another approach free web tools providers might use is called Freemium, free basic access and features and paid advanced or enhanced features.

If not based on pure altruism, the use of “free” web tools implicates a form of exchange. Probably you are not paying with money, you might use a large collection of web tools without paying a single dollar. You pay by allowing a provider to use a portion of your screen (your work area, your field of view, your parted attention) to place an ad. It is not the purpose to remind the reader of this post, that whatever comes to your screen takes a little of your attention in a conscious or unconscious way. Jet another more sophisticated currency is your personal information, as it is voluntarily provided by you to get access to those “free” tools, like email address, zip code, name, etc.

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