ASSIGNMENT 4: Infographic

REFLECTION

                    The topic of my infographic addresses different steps and questions to answer in order to create your own original artwork. The infographic addresses the artistic process, along with questions to ask yourself; the design process, with steps to follow as you work; and ends with a self-evaluation. This allows students a very detailed guide that helps provide them with questions to jump start and follow through on original ideas and thoughts in their work. My target audience is the elementary level, but I would most likely use this with 3rd, 4thand 5thgrade students. 
                     I used Merrill’s Principles of Instruction: Problem/task, activation, demonstration, application, and integration. Students start with a real-world problem, task or prompt given to them by the teacher. Students use previous knowledge to help them come up with an idea for their artwork. They demonstrate knowledge they have learned previously in their planning and thumbnail/brainstorming sketches. They then apply information they know, and new information given to them to work through the steps of the artistic and design processes. Some of these questions and steps may have students go back to previous steps to work through steps for a second time until they arrive at a solution they like. At the end of the infographic students are asked to self-reflect and participate in a class critique. Both of these allow students the time to reflect on a project and discuss new knowledge, challenges and benefits of their project. 
                      My infographic can be used with every project created in the art room. I wanted to create something that could be used multiple times and be hung up year-round in the room for students to access. This infographic supports every aspect of the creative process and self-reflection needed to create art for every student. I think at the elementary level infographics are very useful tools for the classroom. Many times, students don’t want to read a chapter about the creative process or hear me lecture about it, and this infographic gives them a visual that they can access at different points in their work and as often as they need. Keeping the visual bold, bright and simple helps keep students at this young age engaged and focused. I think the use of different bold colors allows for the information to be broken up into smaller chunks so that it doesn’t become too overwhelming. They can utilize part of the infographic without being distracted by other information in a different section. 
Of Mayer’s twelve principles, I think I used coherence, spatial, temporal contiguity, pre-training, and personalization in my infographic. I tried to use coherence to exclude any extra information or pictures to help students focus on the important information and not be distracted. I used the spatial principle by keeping relevant information in the same context box in the infographic. Temporal contiguity is used by presenting graphics along with my words (graphics for each of the essential questions). Pre-training takes place every day in the classroom so that students are introduced to topics prior to seeing the information and answering questions from the graphic. Lastly, I used personalization by keeping the wording more conversational than formal bulleted points. I wanted the questions and steps to flow well together and be easy to follow along with. 
I think infographics are a visual way to learn/work through a process. Even though words are also provided in an infographic our brain reads the entire thing as a picture. I think the graphics keep us involved and interested in the words and help us to retain the information for recall. As we have read, many people are visual learners and sometimes having a colorful, visual way to interpret information is better that reading a chapter in a book that provides the same information. Infographics can be posted anywhere and can be used in any type of classroom as a tool to help visual learners gather information quickly and efficiently. 
                       For my students I would probably have my graphic design class create an infographic and poster on different artists. I would have them complete research on the artist, basic information (bio info), find a picture of the artist, their most famous piece of art and its worth, and a famous quote by them. I would also have them try and find one interesting fact about the artist that most people don’t know about them. After completing this research, I would have them assemble it all into an infographic only including important information and lots of visuals. 
                       I enjoyed this project overall. I think the main problem I had was getting started and deciding what topic I wanted to create an infographic for. I tried to think of a topic that could be left up all year, used with multiple grade levels, go along with standards and one that provided each student with support they need to be creative and successful. Other than that, I didn’t have too many issues with the actual creation of the infographic. I have done lots of illustrator, photoshop, and graphic design over the years and so the technical side of this did not give me too much problem! 

Reference
           Frey, N. & Fisher, D. (2008). Teaching Visual Literacy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.