Create visual representations with SmartArt

- [Instructor] I'm a huge believer in the power of visual representations to improve learning. Which is why I really like the SmartArt feature inside of Microsoft Word. In this video, we'll take a look at the SmartArt feature. So here's some information, the Stages of Mitosis, which I've had to teach in my Biology course, and it lists the five stages, which you could have students memorize, but I really don't think it gets the point across about what Mitosis is, that it's a cycle. So I'm going to use SmartArt to create a quick diagram, or illustration of the Stages of Mitosis.

In order to do this, I'll go to Insert, and then to the right I'll click on SmartArt. It says here Insert a SmartArt Graphic, and when I click there, I receive a pop-up box that allows me to choose the type of graphic that I'd like to enter. I can add a List, Process, Cycle, Hierarchy. In this case it's a cycle. Here I have several choices. I'm going to choose this one, and then click Okay. Now as you can see it enters in a blank illustration of a cycle, and as you can see here, it has five different areas for entering in text, and I have five stages I have to enter, but that's complete luck.

So if I had seven say, I can easily change that by going to the Text Pane, and if you can't see the text pane, you can access it by going to the top left and clicking Text Pane. And you'll notice here, if I'm on the final one, I can click Enter, and it puts in a sixth and a seventh and a eighth, and as I enter in more spots, it adjusts the size of the illustration, which is why it's called SmartArt. It does a lot of very intuitive things. In this case though I only need five, so I'm going to click Delete, Delete, Delete, and I have my five.

Now in the top I'll start to enter in the names of the phases. Interphase, and as you can see as I type that out, and it gets longer, the SmartArt adjusts the size of the font to fit into the diagram. I'll go to the next one. Alright now, after I enter all of them, I can click outside of there, and just like that it creates an illustration. One that in the past I would've tried to insert shapes, and create on my own and it would not have looked this nice. Now when I click on the illustration again, you'll notice that a new set of tabs come up at the top.

They are the SmartArt Tools. Now I have the Design and the Format tab. The Design tab, which if I click, allows me to quickly change the way that the illustration looks, so I can click on some of these other options. I can even get it to kind of a three-dimensional look, I like that. And then if we want we can do things like change colors, so I could change the colors of the arrows by clicking down here. And we can modify that how we want, now If I wanted to change the text size or anything, I can click right inside of there.

It brings up the text box. And when I select that text I get the Rich Text Editor, so I could bold this if I wanted to and change that as well. So just like that I created a visual representation of the Stages of Mitosis in a cycle. And I'm going to open up a new document, and this time I want to show a representation for Bloom's Taxonomy. Now this is a topic that I like to talk about with students and educators, cuz I think it's a really important one, in order to help teach our students higher-order thinking.

So I'm going to center that and I'll put my cursor below this. And then I'm going to go up to Insert, SmartArt, and again we get this list of options. And what I wanna do is to create one that is a Pyramid. And I want one that's a pyramid that's going up, and I'll click Okay. Now here it gives me three different options, but in fact, I need more than that, I need six of them. So this is an example where I'll go to the last one and click One, Two, Three Times, and it now gives me six different levels to this visual.

Now at the top I'm going to enter in the first level which is Create. Below this I'll type in Evaluate. Okay, and once I have that all entered in, again I can click outside of here, and I get this visual. Now I like the overall idea here of the illustration but I don't really like this image. So I'm going to click on it. And again, I can go up to the SmartArt Tools, and I'm going to click on Design and look at some other options here. First I'm gonna go to Different Colors. And here I'm going to look at some of the different color schemes, now I like this one better because it makes the levels stand out a little bit more.

So I'll click off of that. So here I've created a visual of Blooms Taxonomy with the higher-order thinking skills at the top and progressing down. So this is just a couple examples of how to use SmartArt inside of Microsoft Word, but I think it's a great feature for adding visual representations to help out learners.