Infographics as Presentational Assessments

¡Hola! I spent all of last week off from school for mid-winter break. Yes, the whole week off! I'm very lucky, I know. I mostly relaxed, refreshed, and caught up on my DVRed favorite shows, but I got a really exciting email during my vacation that has me so excited to see my students!

Image property of
Creative Language
Class via Piktochart

In early January, Megan and Kara from the Creative Language Class, my absolute favorite World Language blog, announced an infographic contest they were hosting with Piktochart. If you haven't checked out the Creative Language Class blog or played around with Piktochart, I can't recommend either enough. I've been following the CLC blog since 2010 or so and I owe a lot of my philosophy about WL instruction and practice to these ladies. Needless to say, I'm a big a fan because they're so inspiring and make the transition to proficiency-based instruction so much more manageable.

When Megan (fellow Michigan native) and Kara announced the contest, I thought to myself, "Technology and competition?! My two favorite things!" I immediately got started trying to figure out how I could incorporate a Piktochart presentational assessment into my curriculum. Thankfully, the timing was perfect because it was nearly the end of first semester and I was quite ahead with my 7th grade students, who were finishing up a food unit. I had yet to frame exactly what I wanted the IPA (interim performance assessment) to be, but the Piktochart seemed the perfect culminating assessment for my group of very diligent, creative 7th graders. Seriously, this group of kids is just plain impressive and you're about to see some prime examples of why.

I spent several hours framing out a scenario, guidelines, and grading rubric for the assessment, which wasn't easy because I had never done an infographic project and I wasn't sure exactly what I was looking for. I decided to go with a food truck scenario and laid out some authentic resources my students could use to research common foods in their assigned Spanish-speaking countries. I LOVE how the infographic project I created turned out and I'm so happy to be able to share it with you on my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

Plus, Megan and Kara gave me some great positive feedback about how I framed the scenario (see below)!

The Process
I've got a Master's in Library and Information Science, so it was really important to my that my kids used primary sources, but the Spanish teacher in my wanted there to be 1) interpretive practice in the target language and 2) as little translator use as possible. I gave my kids a graphic organizer to help them categorize and note-take and that seemed to help guide their work, which really seemed to help.

The whole process from start to finish took about seven class periods.  I know that's a really long time, but I had extra because this group of students was so exceptional and I felt this was a really worthwhile venture.  When finished, students emailed me a link to their Piktochart and I was blown away by so many of the 33 infographics I received, especially considering the novice-mid level of my 7th grade students and the fact that they were working with a new tech tool.

My student teacher kindly helped me narrow down the a top five and then the two of us worked to select three to submit to Creative Language Class.  Can you believe that two of my kiddos' work was selected for the top five? I will absolutely be doing this and other infographics with Piktochart in the future.  Without further ado, below are the three submitted.

Aren't the samples above AMAZING?!  Would you ylike to let your kids try out making an equally impressive food menu on Piktochart using my project and rubric? Check it out here: