More on infographics

I saw this infographic today:

So, this got me thinking about how you could use this with students. 

1. Ask a question (in this case Do increased IP filings give a good indicator of economic recovery?)
2. Find some data to support / answer your question.
3. Create some slides in Powerpoint (or LibreOffice Impress).  For data, it would be useful to use a spreadsheet (Excel, GoogleDocs, Office Live Skydrive) to make the charts.
4. Export the slides as PNG
5. Assemble the exported PNGs as an infographic with Inkscape (I use the portable version since our school board does not install it on its computers).  Of course, you could use something like Adobe Illustrator, but who has the $$ to buy that?

My previous post gave more details on how to create an infographic.

Some other questions you could try:

1. Does homework time result in higher grades?
2. What is the relationship between interest rates (prime rate) and consumer debt levels?  Did a Google search "canadian prime rate and consumer debt statistics" and found some relevant information.
3. Do the rich really pay their fair share of taxes?  Did a google search "canadian tax revenue by income level" and found this as the third link.  This link led to this link at StatsCan.  And this page should give some relevant data!
4. Analyse a passage of literature with Wordle and use this in an infographic.

Now, it would be interesting if students made infographics that actually showed you could get diverging answers to the same question depending on what data you use and how you interpret it.  That could be a quasi-debate via infographics.