Piktochart-ing with Fourth Graders
Over the summer, I had the opportunity to attend STEAMLab 2017 in Lansing, Michigan. As you may know, STEAM stands for science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics. While there was a wide range of sessions available on this topic, I happened to attend a session on infographics. When I attended the session back in July, infographics was an entirely new concept to me. And using infographics in the classroom...I had no idea.
Thanks to the session presenters, I not only gained knowledge about how to create an infographic, but I also found lesson ideas that I could potentially use with my own students.
Fast forward to October, I decided to introduce infographics to my fourth graders. My students are pretty comfortable with using PowerPoint, as that is the go to choice when asked to design or present information. I wanted to branch out from just using PowerPoint, so I decided to introduce infographics, and specifically the website, Piktochart, to my students.
Working in groups, the students were assigned a social studies vocabulary word from our government unit. Using the vocabulary word card I gave them, which included a student friendly definition, they had to design a poster, or infographic, to explain the word. The infographic would then be presented to the class.
Because my students had no prior experienceswith Piktochart, I introduced the website to the whole group and explained a few basic features that would be important to know. Next, the students had time to work in their groups and play around on Piktochart before they began creating their actual infographic for their vocabulary word.
Since Piktochart and infographics were completely new to my students, we spent a few days creating the posters during our social studies instruction time. The final posters ended up turning out pretty well, especially since my students are just novices at this. Although this was their first experience with infographics and using Piktochart, I plan to incorporate infographics more often and give my students more opportunities to explore the website.
Check out the infographics my students created below by clicking on each vocabulary word.
