Using an Infographic for your Monthly Report

This year I started using an infographic for my monthly report. Do you have a monthly report? If not, how does everyone in your school and community know what you do? How else are they going to realize how busy you are? They're not! They tend to think we're either reading a story to students, checking out books or "playing" on the computer. We know there's so much more, but they don't, and while it would be nice if everyone magically understood what we do, we cannot count on that happening. Ever.

So, what do you do? Be your own advocate and tell them! I have a blog post on my school website that does just that. You can also create an infographic for your monthly statistics. I've typed up lengthy reports in the past at my former school, and to be honest, I don't know that anyone really read them. Infographics are everywhere, especially on Pinterest so I thought, why not try them? 

There are many infographic sites out there and I played with a few before I settled on Piktochart. I promise I'm not getting paid or any lovely bonus goodies for this, but I have to say I really love their product. It was much easier for me to use than the others I tried out and the free account offered enough options that I was satisfied. 

But, when I went to post the infographic for my school website, I couldn't. I could shrink it on the screen and use the snipping tool, but then I couldn't enlarge the image on my blog post without it looking blurry. What do I do now? I've just spent my precious time (when I should be sleeping) creating this create product to help advocate for my school library and I can't share it the way I want to! UGH!!!

After my mini-tantrum, I started searching for an educator's option on Piktochart, and guess what? They have one! It's $39.99 for one year to upgrade to their PRO account, which gives you tons of more options - more templates, options of how to save/download/share and even embed into a blog post. Yeah! 

Even better, if you sign up before September 30th, you can get the one year PRO deal for only $15. Again, I promise, I'm getting nothing out of this other than the joy of sharing a great find with my fellow librarians! We have to stick together! 

Here's the link you need to get your own discounted PRO educators account: http://piktochart.com/pricing/education/

If you already have an account with Piktochart (as I did under my personal email), you can get them to send the code to the original email you used to create your account. It took about five minutes after I filled out the form from the link above. Another five minutes for them to reply with how to use my original account and voila! I had access to all the extras!

So, are you dying to see what I created? It's not as awesome as all those infographics you see on Pinterest, but it's my first attempt and I'm proud of it. I'll become more daring as I get more practice and get to explore all the extra options I now have with the PRO account. 





Let me know if you use infographics to help advocate for your library program or if you use them for lessons. I'd love to hear from you!