Amid the national emphasis on STEM programs, charts are becoming key tools to represent visual statistics. As more and more schools migrate to 1:1 tablets, therefore, students need a foundation in reading and rendering their own optic inputs.
With all of the nimble iPad tools, students can now efficiently create charts and graphs that represent data. In math and science classes, young learners can manipulate lines and layouts to share their findings. Historians and artists can incorporate visual blueprints for the Web 3.0 educational world.
Our own school has been implementing a 1:1 iPad program this year. We've been layering in graphs to help children understand antebellum agriculture and industrial GDP. For helpful posts about teaching with graphs, we recommend the following:
- The School Of Big Data - Choosing The Right Graph
- A Controversy Of Graphic Proportions
- A Taxonomy Of Graphs
- I Love Charts - Discovering Stories Hidden In Numbers
- Graphicacy: 4 Steps To Understanding An Image
The tree graph, in particular, has become wildly popular in the business world to represent customer segmentations. Recent budget graphics and current event maps have also relied on the tree graph to chunk related information.
|Source: Lo's List, David McCandless, Harper Collins, The Visual Miscellaneum|
New categories, however, are emerging to display contemporary data. Tropes from the digital dictionary are now readily recognizable as ways to present visual information. The concept map, matrix grid, flow chart, word cloud, and bubble graph are all now popular tools.
The terrific handout, "Types Of Information Visualization," offers these emerging illustrations in a valuable grid. Presented via Lo Martin, from her interview with graphic guru David McCandless, this table from The Visual Miscellaneum draws on Edward Tufte's work to present visual arrangements for iPad enthusiasts.
We owe a lot to our friend Lam Thuy Vo, the journalist, infographic guru, and interactive media editor at Al Jazeera America, who introduced us to the McCandless framework and who also created the superb diagnosis below of the "Anatomy Of A Chart." It is a first-rate primer for learners of any age as they begin to decode data representations.
|Source: Lam Thuy Vo|