What it is: Glogster is a great creativity site who’s tag line is “poster yourself”. A ‘glog’ is basically an online poster web page. Students can combine text, pictures, graphics, video, and audio to create an interactive online poster. Glogster has a very simple to use interface. The final glog can be hosted by Glogster or you can embed it into a wiki, blog, or class web site.
How to integrate Glogster into the classroom: Glogster is an awesome way for your students to display knowledge. Instead of creating a poster for a presentation, students can create an interactive glog to display information. Glogster can be used for history, math, language arts, book reports, science, social studies, and for public service announcements. In fact, I am having a hard time coming up with a subject that couldn’t use Glogster in some capacity. Students can create these online posters to display any knowledge or learning. You really have to see this site, the creativity that it allows for will get your wheels spinning. Once you start using Glogster with your students, you are going to think of all kinds of new applications. Because Glogster has the ability to handle audio, students can create podcasts (using Audacity, Garageband, G-Cast or Gabcast) and upload the content into their glog. So cool! I really love that students can share their school work and accomplishments online with classmates, family, and friends. Give your students an authentic audience and their work will dazzle you!
Tips: You can check out a quick sample glog that I created here about Internet Safety.
Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Glogster in your classroom.
We are having a debate about this site in our school district. Did you look at some of the content on this site? We saw inappropriate pictures all over the site and are blocking it because of that. Even the /edu site has links back into the .com site so we have not found a way to effectively make it available.
Since you are offering this in an “Internet Safety” discussion, I wondered what your thoughts were.
Ray,
I agree, some of the pictures are inappropriate in a school setting (particularly the emo and punk pictures). In my school, I give students the option of creating a project with Glogster but have the parameters that students don’t use pictures from either of these categories for a school project. I don’t think this falls into the category of an Internet Safety issue because the pictures are acceptable in some families (I am thinking of kids who wear EdHardy to school) and there is no chat like feature on the site. The students create a poster using graphics but they must be appropriate to the subject matter, images from the emo and punk categories do not support Internet Safety lesson. The age of students also needs to be taken into consideration when using Glogster with students. I only use Glogster as an option with my fifth grade students. Glogster may be more appropriate for 5th- 12th grade than for younger students because of the image considerations.
As for the edu site linking back to the .com site, you can request the .com site to be blocked in your district without it affecting the edu site. You just have to specifically blacklist the .com and whitelist the edu site.
Thanks for your question! Would love to know the outcome of the debate in your school district.