At the Edu-Blogger Con East, the first session, is about Glogster as a tool for learning in classrooms.
Participants share, and one enthuses about universal design of learning (UDL). She offers a big endorsement, particularly for the classroom poster board program as an alternative to the normal paper posterboard projects so often used.
GlogsterEDU participation among students is equally split among elementary, middle, and upper schools. The original glogster is a social network site, “mostly used by teenage girls who use it express their angst.” Now, more and more schools are using it as an online scrapbooking, journaling, and poster making site. EDU Glogster is entirely separate, and has no links back to glogster.
As schools like our own, St. Gregory, adopt 1:1 laptop programs, we need to become better informed about options and tools for classroom use. As at most schools, our students regularly do posters for presentations, but with each student having a laptop, the opportunities for them to do work like posterboard presentations online. Glogster seems a great tool.
Glogster is also offering new opportunities for archiving glogs over the course of their term of study, and can serve as a portfolio of their work. The portfolios can also be displayed and viewed in a scrolling device, ala Itunes.
Glogs can also be multi-pages, with links in and among them, so it is wrong for us to limit them categorically or conceptually to one dimensional or simplistic– this is a powerful multi-media tool. For presentations, it is also entirely easy for students to record and embed their own voices.
Fascinated to learn that many schools are beginning to use glogs for their online student newspapers. Love the concept as a multimedia tool to make student journalism more contemporary and more multi-media.
A question is asked about how long it takes students to learn to use glogster edu, and the answer is 10 minutes at most.
There is a great, really informative NYTimes article about students creating and publishing online, which discusses GlogsterEDU:
There are lots of places online for glogster tutorals. Here are two: http://etoolbox.wikispaces.com/glogster and http://etoolbox.wikispaces.com/glogster
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