Yesterday morning I got an email from a reader who was looking for some suggestions for tools that her eighth grade students could use to create infographics. Specifically, she wanted them to create infographics about data the class collected in a survey of their peers’ thoughts about a variety of news topics. I thought it sounded like a great social studies project and I was happy to make some suggestions.
The tools that I suggested were Adobe Creative Cloud Express, Visme, and Canva. They all offer hundreds of good templates for creating infographics. All three offer online collaboration options for students. Despite those similarities there some features of each that are worth noting when trying to pick one for your students to use.
Adobe Creative Cloud Express (formerly known as Adobe Spark) has a free version for schools. The education infographics collection isn’t as large as what you’ll find in Canva, but it does have one editing feature that isn’t found in Canva. That feature is the ability to change the whole color scheme of an infographic in one click. That color scheme selector will change font, graphic, and background colors in one click without changing any other element of the infographic you’re working on. See this feature in action in my video below.
Visme.co offers more than 1300 infographic templates. Rather than having a catch-all “education” category, you’ll find the templates are categorized according to display style like “timeline” and “comparison.” The shortcoming of Visme is that you need to have one of their paid accounts in order to download your finished infographic as a PDF (online display is free).
Canva offers nearly 1,800 infographic templates of which almost 600 are education infographic templates. Canva includes access to thousands of pieces of drawings, illustrations, and photographs that can be used in your infographic. And as you’ll see in my video below, you can even import Bitmojis into your infographic designs on Canva.
Watch this short video for an overview of all three infographic design tools.
