How Easy is Easel.ly?

Easel.ly is a website that allows users create interesting graphics using thousands of graphic templates with minimal frustration and maximum results. After making an account and choose to start a new project, Easel.ly provides a simple to navigate interface that allows users to scan through graphic (Objects and Shapes) categories, upload images and create text boxes. 

A screenshot of Easel.ly

After viewing the graphics, users can drag and drop the graphics, create text boxes, which can be changed in colour and shape for the emerging infographic. Easel.ly has also included 'Vhemes', which area good collection of visual themes that can help a beginner achieve great visual results quick, with moveable graphics and text boxes.  For those a little more confidence, students can start with a blank canvas and add and manipulate all the objects/shapes/text that they want.

For this student, the experience in using Easel.ly was so positive that they continued to use the website for other subject assignments.

The inclusion of guidelines that pop up when arranging objects, and where the objects are in line can help the students achieve professional results in their infographic.

Students were able to upload their own backgrounds when making their infographics.

One limitation that I noticed was the lack of text wrap in text boxes, which meant that text copied from a document would stretch off the screen. To overcome this, the need to break the text into a fixed length to get the desired size for the text box. 

Students could present their information with aesthetics that reflect the topic. Consideration to colour plays an important role when developing infographics.

Another challenge faced was if the browser's security settings were set too strict, students were unable to achieve full functionality. To overcome this, we had to adjust the security settings to medium setting. We also faced some compatibility issues connected to some browsers, in particular Internet Explorer, but this could have been related to the security settings issue. Google Chrome was the most stable browser for the students to use during this unit.

Timelines can present information with an easy to read and understand structure.