Infographics are visual representations of data design to help communicate information clearly. They are great for English Language Learners, and the rest of us, too! The information can also be either serious or humorous.

To see examples of some of the best ones, you can visit:

The Best Infographics — 2010

The Best Interactive Infographics — 2009

You can find even more at The Best Sources For Interactive Infographics.

Of course, you don’t need online resources to have students create their own infographics that can be used towards achieving numerous learning outcomes, as I recently posted about at What A Great Infographic To Use As A Model For Students.

However, creating them online can also be both useful and fun — for both teachers and students.

Here are my choices for The Best Resources For Creating Infographics:

I’m going to start-off with some of my previous “The Best…” lists, including:

The Best Resources For Learning About “Word Clouds”

Not “The Best,” But “A List” Of Mindmapping, Flow Chart Tools, & Graphic Organizers

The Best Tools To Make Simple Graphs Online

The Best Sites For Learning About Cartograms

The Best Map-Making Sites On The Web

The Best Posts To Help Understand Google’s New “Books Ngram Viewer”

Cool New Word Visualization Tool!

And here are resources from other sites:

Make Your Own Infographic from the Wild Apricot blog.

5 Unbeatable Types of Infographic + Free Tools to Create Them comes from The Search Engine Journal.

10 Awesome Free Tools To Make Infographics is from The Make Use of blog.

5 Amazing Tools to Create Your Own Infographics comes from Techchai.

Visualize Everything: 32 Free Tools To Create Different Diagrams is from the 1st Web Designer.

Teaching With Infographics | A Student Project Model from The New York Times Learning Network.

The World Bank held a competition for Web developers to create interactives making the World Bank data more accessible. They have received an amazing number of these online apps. You can see all the submissions at Apps For Development. I’m not sure how many, if any, are accessible to English Language Learners, but I haven’t checked them all out and, in fact, have barely scratched the surface. Better World Flux is one that’s getting a fair amount of attention. It’s particularly attractive since users can quickly create their own visualizations with the app and share them with others.

NewsLab has developed some nice video tutorials on using two tools to create infographics — Google Maps and Many Eyes. Here they are:

I posted about a site called Daytum two years ago — before it opened for the public. It’s a super-easy tool to use to visual any kind of data, though its primary purpose for people to use it to keep track of personal data. I had forgotten about it until I saw an article in The New York Times — Illustrating Your Life in Graphs and Charts — that mentioned it. I’m adding Daytum to this list.

The Outreach Editor at the Wall Street Journal has developed a cool tool call “SparkTweets.” They are simple infographics like this one (the tweet itself didn’t come out the way I had hoped, even though I used the Blackbird Pie tool to copy it — oh well, you get the idea):

They’re very easy to create at the Sparkblocks site. You can also learn more about it at the 10,000 Words blog. In addition, you can see how people are using them at the #sparktweet hashtag.

Create A Better Life Index lets you, without having to register, create an infographic emphasizing the qualities that you believe are key for a “better life” and showing how different countries in the world are doing in those areas. You can then share your infographic with others. It’s from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

I also have to mention the new website Visual.ly, which began this year and is a source of great infographics and new tools to easily create them. They will be rolling out these tools throughout 2011.

A Few Rules for Making Homemade Infographics comes from The Atlantic.

Creating Infographics with Students is from Langwitches.

Visualize.me lets you immediately turn your resume into an infographic. Unfortunately, right now it only works through Linked In. However, its founder says it will integrate that ability to other sites, too, including Facebook and Twitter.

The Anatomy Of An Infographic: 5 Steps To Create A Powerful Visual is a useful outline.

Thanks to Nik Peachey, I’ve learned about Easel.ly today, which is hands-down the easiest tool I’ve seen on the Web to create infographics. You just “drag-and-drop” a variety of themes, type in your data, and you’ve got a great infographic. Here’s a video from the site explaining how it works:

Infogr.am looks like a pretty easy tool for creating infographics that can be linked to or embedded. The selection of templates is pretty limited, but the site is still in beta. The main problem with the site is that you can only log-in using a social media site like Facebook or Twitter. That makes it usable for teachers, but, since those sites are blocked in most schools for students, they would not be able to create their own.

Venngage is the newest easy tool for creating online infographics. Like several other sites on this list, it has a number of templates where you just add your info, click publish, and you get an embeddable image.

Through Silvia Tolisano, I recently learned about a very creative idea of using concrete objects to make infographics. You can find out more about this idea at:

Creating Infographics: Making Numbers Sing

A Kit For Creating Homemade Real-World Infographics, Using Balloons And Wood

8 Steps to Create an Infographic is a useful infographic.

Innovative educators use infographics to engage learners is a post from The Innovative Educator.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA has a site called JPL Infographics where you can find a bunch of great…infographics. But what’s even better is that it’s set up for people to create their own, too.

Teaching With Infographics is from the Aside Blog.

Infographics: Round 2 is from Joyce Valenza.

Piktochart

Presenter is a new free online tool for creating online presentations, animations and — at least in my mind — most importantly, infographics. Most of the options on Presenter all look impressive but, for my technologically incompetent tastes, are just slightly more complicated than I would like (though I’m sure they all would be fine for most readers of this blog). I, though, particularly like their infographic tool. Once you register and sign-on, you have the option to click on the Presenter tool or a tool to create websites. The Presenter tool is free, and the website one costs money. After you click on Presenter, you’re offered different features within it, including infographics. They only offer a few templates now, but I’m sure more will become available soon.

Creating Infographics With Your Students is by Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano.

This infographics provides a pretty decent guideline for making good infographics:

How To Create An Awesome Infographic

Feedback is welcome.

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You might also want to explore the nearly 600 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.