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Telling Stories with Data

When I was in school, we didn’t have infographics. In order to get information, we either had to listen to the teacher lecture, or read a book or news article. We read a lot. And this wasn’t that long ago, I graduated from high school in 2004. When we wanted to share information, the most creative we could get involved poster board, unless we had a lot of extra time on our hands, then we could create something 3-d. While the ability to share information with anyone on the internet had become easy, everything either looked the same, or your had to know html.

Now, a person can read and share information in a number of different ways. While physical projects may still be used, many require an online portion. Students can create websites with ease, write blogposts, and use social networking to share information. But deciding the avenue of sharing information often depends on the medium information with be shared. One can simply type up the information, or share links to various articles. But why not write a story in a picture.

Flowingdata shares what was discussed and taught at a conference on “Telling Stories with Data.” All of the same information is available, but many words are but out, and replaced with symbols. Arrows and stars are significant, showing the flow of events and the most important piece of information. One can do this on the computer on still using a poster board. But this is a much more entertaining, and thus much more memorable way to share information. Encourage your students to write stories using data, or to summarize news articles by creating an infographic.

blog: http://goo.gl/mD0wZ


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