Web-based ways to design beautiful posters and infographics

Made with Canva in 15 seconds

One of the benefits (or limitations) of using Chromebooks and mobile devices in the classroom is our reliance on the design tools of MS Office, like brochures in Word or slide shows in PowerPoint. There are well-known web-based options for presentations, like Google Slides and Prezi for presentations, but there are also some great tools for posters, infographics and more.

Piktochart (www.piktochart.com) and Easel.ly (www.easel.ly) lets you create an infographic, report, banner or presentation graphic from a variety of templates. It provides a huge number of shapes, icons, backgrounds and fonts to beautifully customize a poster or document. You can import and display data in various ways and can even connect an infographic to dynamic data (like a Google Form that continues to populate). It's a good alternative to the design features of the Microsoft suite and an addition to the limited design options available in Google Apps for Education.

Canva (http://www.canva.com) is a beautiful and very easy-to-use option for posters, brochures, and other display formats. It also offers design tutorials, with lessons on using color, fonts, images and backgrounds, and even an introduction to branding.

There are Pro options for Piktochart, Easel.ly and Canva, but most of the features in the free versions are plenty for creative presentation of information.

A different way to present

As teachers, we do a lot of presenting and sometimes the same old PowerPoint or Google Slides gets old. Haiku Deck tries to break the cycle of bullet points and clip art with a simple (think "haiku") image-heavy design. Haiku Deck offers thousands of beautiful, well-categorized images to choose from (or use your own, of course). It's free, web-based, and can be installed as a Chrome app.


10 Tips to Transform Your Presentations - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

If it's not a full presentation, but just an image or infographic you need, check out Canva, which even offers "design school" for the less aesthetically capable among us.