Piktochart

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.