Despite the importance we attach to words, it is unquestionable fact that human brain is much faster at perceiving and processing images. You may see the examples of it everywhere: the Internet is getting increasingly graphic-heavy as bandwidths grow, road signs which are supposed to be processed and understood in a matter of milliseconds are mostly images and so on.
The infographic is interesting in this respect because it combines text and images to boil down even the most complex information into concise, easy-to-understand and visually pleasing graphics. It is no wonder they are so widely used in business, mass media and, lately more and more often, education.
Teachers, professors and educators on all academic levels find them an excellent way to make use of students’ visual perception. Of course, all people are different and some of them may be less perceptive of visual information than the others, but skillfully and colorfully represented combination of visuals and text seems to be the variant that successfully gets through to the absolute majority of people irrespectively of age.
In addition to being easily understandable without prolonged preparation, students themselves can make their own infographics with a little training and use them, for example, to present their projects during classes. This will not only make the process of their preparation and presentations much more interesting, but it also teaches students a new skill that may come in handy later on.
One may think that teaching students to make infographics will take a lot of time, which seems to be an unacceptable luxury nowadays when educators face a severe lack of school hours to get the already existing curriculum to their students. However, most infographics, no matter how pretty and neat they look, don’t require that much time to make. After all, they are not done by hand – there is special software for it, and while some tools are commercial and quite expensive, there are enough free ones to go around. A number of them, such as visualize.me and Google Developers, are actually quite good and allow one to produce professionally-looking infographics without extensive training.
All in all, it looks like an important new trend in educational technology that neither teachers nor students can safely ignore. It is very likely that in the years to come we will see the usage of infographics and other similar visual aids to be greatly increased in all branches of education. The easiness with which they are produced and their usefulness turn infographics into an ideal tool in the hands of an innovating educator.
If you are a student, it would be a good idea to pay attention to them as well – for the simple reason that school is unlikely to be the last place where you will have to deal with infographics, either by receiving information through them or by making infographics of your own. Learning the main principles of how they are made and what is to be paid special attention to, you will do yourself a world of good in a few years’ time.