Glogster
Create Interactive Posters Using 21st Century Skills

With the creation of the Education 2.0 addition, the site is very teacher-friendly. Now teachers can register for a master account with up to 200 student accounts. The site provides plenty of support for teachers who want to use this application in their classrooms.

21st Century Skills

Creativity, effective communication skills and student collaboration during group projects are all used when students use this site.

Creating these online posters can definitely spark students’ creativity while turning potentially dull assignments into individually creative and highly visually-stimulating ones.

This Web 2.0 tool's visual, audio, and textual elements help to develop the visual literacy skills needed by 21st century learners. Visual literacy is the ability to understand and produce visual messages. Visual literacy has become increasingly important in today’s information age as students are becoming more and more surrounded by images expressing all kinds of information and knowledge.

An excellent resource for learning more about the importance of teaching visual literacy in the classroom is The Visual Literacy White Paper written by Dr. Anne Bamford. This Web 2.0 teaching tool utilizes the valuable skills of information literacy as students locate, gather, analyze, and organize information and images to synthesize into an interactive poster online.

In the Classroom

An interactive glog is a wonderful way for students to share their knowledge and can be used across the curriculum. Glogs can be used for book reports, math, science, social studies, language arts, poetry, and public service announcements – almost anything you can think of.

Students upload podcasts that they create to their glogs. The site also handles video uploads.

Final glogs can be hosted on Glogster or teachers can embed them into a blog, wiki or other web site. By sharing their glogs with class members and family, students communicate with an authentic audience.






Visit the Web 2.0 Teaching Tools Wiki to see examples of class projects.

Tips for Teachers:

1. Minimum image sizes to avoid blurriness (My students have discovered through trial and error that these picture sizes work best when creating their glogs.) -
1. Picture for Wall 800x800+
2. Others pictures for glog 400x400+
2. A rubric is a good assessment tool for glogs. Remember to give students a copy of the rubric that will be used to evaluate their completed glog and oral presentation at the beginning of the project.
3. Thorough planning is imperative to have a successful learning activity using glogster.
1. For research-based projects students should complete all research before creating their glogs.
2. Remember to include plenty of time for students to search for appropriate images, videos, sound and hyperlinks for inclusion in their glogs.
3. Have students pre-write information for textboxes. It is more difficult and time-consuming to “compose” at the computer for most students.
4. Since Glogster does not have a spell-check tool, all text, including titles and captions, must be carefully proof-read.
5. When creating their glogs, have students follow a sequence for inserting elements, such as first the wall and title for the glog. Then text can be added, followed by pictures and their captions. Videos, sound and graphics can complete the glog.
6. Be sure to build time in the planning stage for students to present their glogs to other students. Even though textboxes may include their research findings, remind students to “talk” their topic and not to just read the information in their textboxes. Glogs are good tools to encourage students to participate in oral presentations.

Tutorials

Here is an excellent video tutorial for teachers – “A Detailed Tutorial on Glogster EDU.”

Here is a tutorial created by Traci Blazosky, an elementary teacher – “Glogster Tutorial”

Download this free tutorial "Creating and Presenting Glogs" for your students or to share with other teachers.

Safety Concerns

Remind students not to identify themselves with their full first and last names, home address or phone number when posting their work online.

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