Visual Design and Presentation in Education

“Information can be useful -- and even beautiful -- but only when it’s presented well.” So how do you go about creating such an amazing infographic? I have 9 steps that may just help you.

Read more:

http://blog.mindjet.com/2012/07/9-step-guide-to-creating-marvelous-infographics/

"The Photos app in iOS includes a built-in crop tool that works very well for quick edits on the go with the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Perhaps even better, there’s a constraint tool that lets you instantly crop images to a variety of common photo proportions, ranging from a perfect square, 4×3, 8×10, 5×7, 16×9, and others taking the guesswork out of the process. No additional downloads or apps required, it’s all featured in the default Photos app."

With the help of this screen magnifying software, the presenters can zoom in and highlight any section of the screen for making it clear to the viewers.

If you are looking for a free alternative to Prezi, then try Impress.js and Impressionist. Impress.js is a free presentation tool inspired by the Prezi platform that can be used for creating attractive presentations.

http://bomomo.com/

KF:  A small, fast loading web based application that allows you to "paint" all manner of image. 

Have you ever wondered how today’s beautiful visualizations are created? If you Google ‘process of creating a data visualization’, you’d be hard-pressed to find a good resource that describes it. And maybe the reason is that there is no such process — not a formal one, anyway.

Despite not having a required set of steps, here are three stages that the visualization creation proces goes through...

It is important to keep your blog readers and website visitors interested in the information you share. Coming up with creative and eye-catching ways to grab the attention of online users is extremely crucial in having people visit and return to ...

Stipple lets you put information inside your images. It links your images back to you wherever they go.

"As a child, I grew up in a world that was dominated by left-brained thinking. Both my parents were in professions that required in-depth analytical thinking. The “rule” in my house was: “If you break something, try to fix it. Only THEN come ask Dad for help.”
Looking back now, I realize something I never understood then — what he had instilled was an ability to think critically. Along with creativity, collaboration, and communication, critical thinking is one of the four components of learning in the 21st century. Unlike the other three, critical thinking is often difficult to reduce to bite-size pieces of understanding and challenging to teach to others."

Read on for an example of teaching critical thinking with a first grade class as well as a look at 3 underlying components to critical thinking.

Description by edtechteacher

"No longer do images that teachers and students use for presentations have to be static presentations. Thinglink is a new web tool that allows images to be uploaded and tagged with hot spots. These hot spots can be text, links to web based content, or YouTube videos. When the image is viewed online, the hot spots become click-able and reveal the embedded content. Thinglink allows for a completely new approach to using images in the classroom and provides a new medium by which students can present image based content for projects or assignments.:

Gephi is an open-source software for visualizing and analyzing large networks graphs. Gephi uses a 3D render engine to display graphs in real-time and speed up the exploration.

This article and infographic posted by Chelsey Kilser and Daily Infographic and is about the of findings from Entrepreneur, TheLogoFactory and Logodesignworks. 

Jan Gordon:

Effective social business requires a strong brand message,  great content and the ability to build community through deeper engagement and is first and foremost. However, the way you package your services matters and the colors you use are very important.

Excerpt:

"Colors matter and they are one of the factors that keeps your company standing out, gives your company a voice and gives you leverage over other similar companies."

Here are a few takeaways:

**The true colors of the world's top brands:

     *29% use red

     *33% use blue

     *13% use yellow

     *28% use black or grayscale

**Good information about how people respond to different colors

     Here are just a few:

      *Red is agressive, provacative, attention-

        grabbing

      *Purple signifies royalty, sophistication, mystery

      *Black means prestige, value, timelessness

      *Brown is earthlike, natural, simplistic

Selected by Jan Gordon covering "Content Curation, Social Business and Beyond"

See article and infographic here: [http://bit.ly/OjaJjM]