I may be dating my self, but do you remember the old Reese peanut butter cup commercial — “You got chocolate in my peanut butter”? Well, if you do remember it, you will know the main premise is a combination of two things can sometimes produce something else that is really, really cool. The same is true when infographics are used in combination with ThingLink.
Infographics
Infographics, or visual representations of information or data, are used by educators as learning tools. There are a number of online tools available to create infographics easily, which are very intuitive to use:
ThingLink
ThingLink was originally created for online interactive advertising. But educators were quick to adapt it for creating interactive course content. It only takes a few minutes to add rich media tags to create an interactive image.
The Combo
Although vision is our dominant sense, a graphic alone is often not enough for effective teaching and learning. By combining the two mediums, you are able to convey ideas and key points so that the learning becomes layered, thus, encouraging scaffolding of instruction/learning. While the infographic conveys the main points visually, and enforces them with supporting text and data, the rich media tags introduce interactivity, with the links to further explanatory text, photos, videos, social media, polls and links to other online resources. This engages students an organic style of exploration.
The education versions help to create online active learning environments, where students are able to work on group projects, engage in formative assessments, interact with other students and even create virtual reality 360° annotated interactive images. Note, with ThingLink there are student privacy issues to consider, but the education versions do permit instructors to generate usernames and passwords for student use.
The ThingLink Education Blog contains many examples of ThingLink multimedia images, including some interactive infographics.