Seeing Time - Who are these kids?

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The assignment for this week as to find an infographic and think about how we would use it with our class.

I chose this image for a few reasons, the most significant in my mind would be the desire to work with these students.  As an EdTech coach, and someone deeply interested in the environment, I think it would be great to be working with more kids outside.

In grade 3 we are looking at design using the CRAP design principles.  Reid created this which I also shared with my class.

This is creative commons certified just hard to see

Our class looked at the first image and found that the colour theory was what made the first infographic difficult to process. We though that by using contrast between outdoor colours and indoor colours the graphic may have been more engaging. 

The students found the colour scheme really interesting.  They didn't know how it was chosen.  While at Learning 2.0 with Heather Dowd I talked about Kuler  which lets you look at images and take a colour scheme from them. We found this tool really useful and I wondered about how we could use this to make the infographic more engaging. 

Screen shot taken from the app store

The big take aways for me this week are how important colour and design principles are when trying to engage learners.   We've been talking about the importance of images, but we really need to create or use powerful images as teachers.  Without powerful beautiful images (Heather suggested we keep a beautiful images catalogue in our google+, which I am going to start) we can't really engage students the way we want, and there is no great example for students to shoot towards.

More than this, I've been chatting with my environmental education group about the importance of story telling.  I think images, infographics and stories can play a powerful role in creating connections between people and their world, but in order to do that, we need to have powerful images.