Most of my students are currently involved in the two week school swimming program. As is always the case, there are some students not particpating, so Kathleen Morris and I alternate between taking the swimmers and supervising the “non-swimmers”.
Traditionally, we complete a variety of “fill in” activities during this time with the non-swimmers, as there is no point running regular Literacy and Numeracy sessions when most students are at the pool. However, this time we decided we’d focus on teaching the students some new ICT skills and how to use a several web 2.0 tools.
Last week I introduced the students to Glogster. Glogster is an online tool that allows you to make free interactive posters, or “glogs”. The word glog is short for graphical blog. We signed up for a teacher account and then made individual accounts for the students within ours.
You can add text, images, photos, audio, video and special effects to create a glog, and finished glogs can be embedded into blogs so you can share them with everyone. Needless to say, the students loved it and were so engaged, many students even went home and produced glogs on their own. Here’s a couple of examples of my Grade 2 student glogs:
This lesson got me thinking, how could Glogster be used for future Literacy lessons? Students could make glogs for…
- Start of the year “All About Me” projects
- Classroom rules
- Different reading strategies
- Book responses/book reviews
- Their school holidays
- Word/spelling lists
- Cyber safety posters
- “How to write a quality blog comment” poster
- Guided Reading responses
- Passion Projects
- Character profiles
- Personal goal setting
The possibilities are endless and extend only as far as your imagination!
Nice post Kelly,
I love glogs. I started using them last year with my Year 3 class and gave children the option of using them as a presentation tool for an inquiry we did recently. Three of the seven groups chose glogs and loved them. I do find you have to set the expectations at the start though as there are a lot of features that could potentially be played with excessively and waste time. Last year I told my kids that if they used something on the glog, it had to be linked to their project in some way rather than just put on because it looked cool. One group put some random angels in which were different colours so I asked them to justify their choice. The responses were completely made up (as every individual had a different answer and had to think quite hard about it) however, they all managed to think creatively and find some link back to their project. Who knew that glogs could inspire this type of critical/creative thinking.
I’ve recently put the glogs up on my blog: leakyesblog.edublogs.org (I had a few problems with the embed code so they are just images which are linked to the glogs).
Sarah
@ Sarah,
Nice to hear from you and it’s great that you’re already using Glogster. It’s a terrific tool and so engaging for the students. I agree that setting boundaries and ensuring the students aren’t just adding anything and everything to their glogs is important.
I had trouble with the Glogster embed codes too. When I switched between “Visual” and “HTML” the code would get lost. The only way it would work was by completely finishing the post in “Visual” and adding the embed codes into HTML and then making sure I didn’t go back to “Visual”. I’m not sure if that was your problem, but that’s the way I solved my issue.
Thanks again,
Kelly
To Miss Jordan,
On Saturday I went on Fun 4 the brain most day and I played all the Subtraction games they are all so fun. Sorry that it is not about the post!
And thank you for putting Megs and my Glogster on your post.
Love from your student,
Kayla
@ Kayla,
You have learnt so many skills this year and I just love how you enjoy learning at school and at home!
You did a terrific job with your glog, so I thought it would look great on this post.
Enjoy your weekend!
Your teacher,
Miss Jordan
Dear Miss Jordan,
Thank you for replying to me.
So far I have not had a good weekend because
I have had to pack clothes, my toys and my holiday book!
Thank you for making the book for me my Mum really
likes it, she things you are very very cleaver.
I hope you have a good weekend.
Love From,
Kayla ♐ ♥
Thanks for the post Kelly,
I haven’t used glogster before, although I’ve heard great things about it. One of the reasons I haven’t tried it with students is because I was worried that the Glogs could get cluttered and features might be added just because they were flashy, as Sarah mentioned. But both of you stressed how important it is to set clear expectations (as with any activity) and keep them accountable to those expectations. And basically, I just need to trust that they can handle the responsibility to produce their own representations of what they are learning.
The other reason I have been wary of glogster is that it often seemed to be cumbersome to load, especially when videos and other media are added. But we can start simple, maybe just images, text, and audio.
But I’m going to definitely give them a try this year. I bet many of my students who are stronger visual learners will really enjoy glogs as opposed to the more audio tools like voicethread or photobabble.
Thanks for the reminder and gentle push to give it a try!
-Jonah
@ Jonah,
I agree, a glog that is cluttered and has lots of images/video/graphics etc “just for the sake of it” takes away from the purpose. When I introduce a tool such as Glogster I am always very explicit in my instructions, and while these tools are fantastic for allowing individuality and creativity, young students still need some initial guidance.
I think your students would love to create “All about me” glogs when you first go back to school. Might be a nice “get to know you” activity.
Look forward to seeing how you use Glogster with your new class!
Kelly