As students we’ve all been given poster projects which we’ve spent hours creating just to have them ruined on our way to school. Either something that was glued onto the poster falls off on the bus and we didn’t realize it until we got to school or we had to transport it in the rain just to have everything written in marker smear. In short, carrying posters to school is hard and very annoying. With the growing Media Age, there is a way to create posters online in a way that is new and exciting for students. This site is called Glogster.
Glogster allows users to create glogs. Glogs are online multimedia posters that can include youtube videos, pictures, text, audio, and links to other websites. You can even costumize your background by choosing from their background library and choosing from their many graphics to add clipart and symbols to your glog/poster.
The Youtube video embedded below, fastactionglogging, quickly demonstrates how easy it is to create a glog and how easy it is to make your glog unique. While this video is very informative, it doesn’t highlight the fact that you can add a link to words or photos guiding the viewer to where you got your information from. This tool helps students learn that they need to cite where they got their information from.
More tutorials about using glogster can be found on the Glogster dotcom youtube channel.
To see how glogster works, I created my own glog about Dalmatians, which can be found below. I practiced embedding links, videos, text, audio, and pictures in my glog. I even chose a white background with black dots to match my topic!
One of the cool things about glogster is that they have their own Glogopedia Library which sorts glogs into certain categories such as social studies, art, and science just to name a few. Once you choose which discipline you want to know more about you can even further narrow your search by choosing a subject within that discipline. For example, if I were to give my 5th grade class a project where they each had to make a glog about a specific illness or disease, they would go to the Health and Fitness discipline and then go to the illness and disease subject to look at examples of what other have done.
While glogs can be fun and motivational they are a good assessment tool for teachers to see how students understand the material. In the post Using Glogster as an Assessment Tool by José Picardo on boxoftricks.net. Picardo brings up a good point as to why glogs are so great- they incorporate listening, reading, writing and speaking all in one project. These four skills are vital in order for a student to succeed. Unlike traditional posters, students can peer assess one another by leaving comments underneath the glog. Student comments can also help teachers see if the students are fully understanding what they are suppose to be understanding or if further teaching on the subject is required.
To find out more ways to use glogster in the classroom or how to assess your student’s glogs, visit some of these great sites:
- 40+ Ways to Innovate Teaching Using Gloster EDU– this blog post is from Glogster itself and gives many creative ways to use glogs in the classroom!
- Schooltube’s glogster channel shows how much fun children have creating glogs while teachers enjoy how clean and mess-free they are compared to traditional poster making.
- Integrating Glogster into my lesson plans– another great article from boxoftricks.net showing how to incorporate glogster into a lesson plan!
- Using Glogster in the Classroom– A teacher’s story on using Glogster in her classroom on the Milwaukee Area Technical College website.
Hopefully you all have learned new things about the great cool tool that is known as Glogster! Do you think you would assign your students projects using glogster? As a student do you think you would want to create projects using glogster? Let me know what you think about Glogster!