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Piktochart
Pros: Tons of templates, icons, and fonts. Includes screen recording. Free version doesn't have watermarks, except on videos.
Cons: Sharing features may need some fine-tuning. Free version not suitable for whole-class use.
Bottom Line: An easy-to-use tool for producing and sharing great visual content in the classroom.
How you use this tool really depends on the kind of account you pay for. The best fit for teachers who will be using it regularly might be to spring for the $39/year educator subscription, which offers unlimited projects, unlimited downloads, and lots of features to help you create, edit, and share your designs with your students. Students could do well with free accounts, which have more limited features (only two downloads and five projects at a time), if they'd only be using Piktochart once or twice a year.
Use Piktochart to organize and distill information into understandable chunks for lesson plans and presentations. Try using a template to design your own classroom newsletter or develop the layout for a school newspaper, then download the design and have your students work together to fill in the blanks. Encourage your students to use the tool to create their own infographics, reports, presentation slides, or even videos for any subject. Anything with graphs, charts, timelines, or big lists will benefit from the ready-to-use templates available with this chart, from a diagram of the three branches of the U.S. government to a plot diagram for a novel to survey data from a student opinion poll.
Notably, the free version of Piktochart allows only two downloads of projects and there's no password-protected sharing, so teachers trying to get by on the free version should be mindful of students' privacy and not put them at risk by sharing their work publicly.
Piktochart is a design tool for creating visual media. Teachers and students can use the simple drag-and-drop interface to create presentation slides, posters, flyers, infographics, and more that feature charts, graphs, text, and other graphics. There's also screen- and webcam-recording, and users can edit their recorded videos and audio by selecting text in the auto-generated captions for each video. Although it's geared toward adults in the workplace, Piktochart has an education pricing option and a collection of templates specifically geared toward K–12 teachers and their students. There are extensive video tutorials, pop-up tips, and a knowledge base with info on how to make the most of the tool and its features.
While Piktochart previously had a mobile version, it now works best on Firefox and Chrome browsers. Educators can purchase an account for $39 per year, and it includes unlimited projects, downloads, and unlimited cloud storage. Meanwhile, the free version (likely a better fit for students) supports up to five projects and stores up to 100 MB of content. To share content, users can create a web link that's accessed by all with the free version; only paid accounts have the option to share those links with password protection.
It's exciting to find a tool that combines the drag-and-drop simplicity of a design tool like Canva with the serious task of organizing and presenting information. Although the tool is mostly geared toward business users, there are tons of school-ready templates for timelines, newsletters, and appealing charts and graphs. The video editing tools are also a standout feature. Teachers can record themselves or record their screen. Piktochart then auto-generates captions. Teachers can edit those captions to correct spelling or grammar, or select and delete portions of the video. This smart feature could be game-changing for helping teachers edit videos more quickly and efficiently.
Piktochart's developers are eager to distinguish their product from comparable drag-and-drop design tools; there's a whole page on their site devoted to explaining how this tool is different from -- and perhaps better than -- tools like Canva or Venngage. While Piktochart certainly has terrific features for creating serious infographics, its features for sharing are surprisingly limited. The default option is to simply share a public link to what you've created, and free accounts have a lifetime limit of just two project downloads. Pro accounts have unlimited downloads and have the option to password-protect shared content, but the default option seems to drive users toward keeping their creations online to fuel the Piktochart paltform. While that may not be a deal-breaker for some classrooms, it's limiting and might cause some privacy concerns.