Recent Problem Solving Experience in Honors British Literature

In Honors British Literature, I assigned my students to make infographic resumes/profiles of literary characters. Click here for some real-world examples.

An infographic, I told them, is not just a poster with pictures and text. A good infographic has fewer words than it has images: graphs, icons, maps, etc. Click here for a good example. Here is one that actually moves.

Of course, I didn't expect my students to be able, yet, to make something as impressive and professional as these, but I wanted them to try.

I gave them four tools to use: infogr.am, piktochart, venngage, or easel.ly.

I also gave them two of my own attempts, although they aren't finished. I was reluctant to try show them too much because I didn't want to give them any ideas.

My examples are here and here. They are not as serious as I would like the students to have theirs be, but I thought they would be helpful.

The students soon ran into some problems.

1. None of these online tools are designed for collaborative work. Since this is a group assignment, they needed to figure out how that would work when they worked at home. Some groups decided that they would just text each other when they were going to work on it and text when they were finished, so they could avoid the problems of too many cooks spoiling the dinner, so to speak. Other groups decided that they would just have one person manipulating the infographic itself while the others supplied the quotations, ideas, etc.  They did run into some problems, with things being deleted or not saving and two students doing similar work without knowing it.  
2. Some groups realized right away that coming up with interesting and insightful graphs or charts sounds fun, but they struggled with actually coming up with ideas. It was interesting to see the students' puzzling this out. Using a numerical spreadsheet to make a graphical representation of ideas, personalities, or events in a story is new to them and they struggled.   In order to make a graph like the one below, they need to populate a spreadsheet like this one.  

   

   Spreadsheet

   

   Graph

   For me, the best way is to look at the various sorts of charts a person can make and see if there is any way to use it for my own purpose. Other students were drawing things on paper and loudly brainstorming. In the end, most of the groups came up with good ideas.
3. All of the groups struggled with the online infographic tools and had to solve those problems--sometimes over and over. All four of the tools can be glitchy, they have limited icons for free users to use, and this sort of work is almost totally new to all of the them.

Overall, I would say that I had some concerns before starting, but it did work out well. I was worried that the students would spend the majority of their intellectual energy on design and fonts and not on the exploration of the text and characters. I think they focused on the proper things, though, in the end. I was also worried that they needed to have very thorough walkthroughs of all four tools in order to get anything even started. I refrained, though, in an effort to let them solve their own problems.

I am mostly happy with the outcome. Their work could be better.  They could have tried a bit more to be creative, and they could have included more textual evidence.

However, it was a worthwhile assignment and it was successful, for the most part.

Click here to see them all.  This is perhaps the best one: click here.