This week I decided to look into the world of Glogster. This week there was a focus on Visual Literacy and the use of interactive and multimodal resources. Glogster falls into this category as it essentially is an online poster. It can be made up of so many components with many links to external resources. It is a step up, in classiness, from your average PowerPoint presentation. Glogster has now been around for several years and so many of the creases have been ironed out and it is a great tool.
As a teacher I can make a poster and teach my class, for the lesson, from this one poster. It is an engaging tool that creates a 'fun' lesson and learning experience. It is 'fun' as it can have pictures, information, links to websites with more information and even movie/YouTube clips.
It allows students to be creative as creative as they want. Not only can I present the lesson with a Glogster presentation but they can also present, submit and create their assignment in the form of a 'Glog' poster as well. Glogster has several different 'basic' formats that you can use or create one completely from scratch - this works if there is nothing that really fits well. As a student I had to create an 'online poster', well more of a poster that was completely created using technology, and if I had known about this it would have made the assignment a lot more pleasant and enjoyable. And yes 'memorable' assignments are ones that stick because you engaged well with the topic, but this is memorable for the wrong reason. Not only can any age get use out of creating a Glogster but it can accommodate to any subject, to any depth! Topics that have previously been labelled by students as 'boring' are now full of excitement and interest levels of the students will be spiked! And therefore learning in an engaging classroom will take place - every teacher's ultimate goal.
The Glog I made could be how a Teacher introduces a topic/author/poet for further research or the result of a student's work after reading a book and creating a visual and interactive poster on the author/poet/book. The layout that this one has taken could be the result of any year level but I chose Year 10-12 as the maturity and content of the book is to much for a lower year. Which leads me to say that this told can be used by any year levels, that can use a computer and understand, as it is easy to use and rather quite enjoyable. Both students and teachers have unlimited resources and possibilities the sky is the limit. No really, your imagination is!
Being safe on the web for students is not as big of a deal as other forms that are available to use. This is because it is a safe and secure location that can only be accessed with the use of a password and school name. For this reason, I feel that it is an excellent choice to use in the classroom or as a virtual classroom. Teachers are able to create glogs (and they do not have an expiration date!!), link them to other online tools, for Wikis as an example, and students are able to access them, at any time, to refer back to. This not only uses the Glogs (brilliant), and wikis (birlliant) but combines them to make the wiki experience even more powerful (BRILLIANT!!).
I guess one minus to a glog is that the creator only has a certain amount of space and this cone possibly be limiting. But on the other hand, that is what the links are for, resizing and the ability to have a certain space for text and the scroll bar rather than having a huge space taken up for text.
I have thoroughly enjoyed puttering about looking at other glogs and creating my own. I will certainly find many places to incorporate this into my classroom.
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