My informative Glog is all about Coombe Island. What an engaging experience, creating this interactive poster. I thoroughly enjoyed every minute until I lost it all. Yep, all 2 hours worth! The second time around however was very quick and easy. I managed to make an informative and visually interesting page for would be campers of Coombe Island. I uploaded my own photos, my own audio, and links to National Parks Island information and bookings and maps to show exactly where Coombe is.
This tool takes the urban phenomenon of scrapbooking and drops it into an interactive online space where you can add images, text, audio and video, publish it and have it viewed by others.
I can see this presentation tool being a real winner with students, especially those who aren't successful with handwriting or drawing. Gone are the days of presentations being made on an A2 piece of card with the felt pen scrawled across it running from sweaty hands. This tool should be an option for every student who ever has a presentation to make. Students can take turns presenting their Glog to the class on an interactive whiteboard and choose viewers to come up and interact with the poster. I can see this being a creative, fun and exciting learning tool with the level of engagement being quite high when each child's poster is displayed to the whole class.
This is a learning tool that can be used to support all the KLA's with educational graphics ready to use. Glogster claims that Glogster edu is a secure and private platform which is monitered directly by the registering teacher with master account controls. The teacher registering for Glogster moniters the content of all students glogs. All students are given a password and they will only be able to communicate and see other glogs created within their classroom.
Their is a rating process for student glogs, however it is merely the clicking of stars on a five-star scale underneath each glog. This would probably only be used by myself as a form of encouragement with assessment being undertaken in the typical fashion as per the QCAR framework.
Strengths:
- gives students the opportunity to use digital technology for presentations.
- enables not so creative students to be very creative quite easily.
- when presentations are being made, viewers would be more engaged than if they were watching and listening to a more traditional presentation.
- very eye-catching and colourful.
- students can connect to other student's glogs in the classroom.
Weaknesses:
- to print out you would lose all interactive components of the glog, eg. links,audio and video.
- not a lot of space for text once images have been used.
- students would have to work on the glogs at school only as teachers need to sign students in and monitor work.
- can encounter technical difficulties.
Opportunities:
- At the start of the school year teachers could make an interactive classroom rules poster to dispaly on the interactive whiteboard. Students could take turns discovering links, audio and video.
- Teachers could make a weekly glog presentation poster of what the week will include for the class; what they learnt in the week prior; any new and interesting thing coming to the class, eg. Reader's Cup Challenge, Arts Council etc.
- Teachers could make a poster for the start of each term with snippets of what will be happening in that term for the class, eg. Yoga, Athletics Carnival, Cross Country, Mothers Day, etc.
- Students can design awareness posters for special school occassions, eg. Anti Bullying Day, Plant A Tree Day, Care For The Cassowary, etc.
- A glog poster can be made to display on a library computer with book/author of the week/month. Children entering library can learn more about authors with links, audio and images.
Threats:
- Not 100% certain about how secure glogs are even though teachers are able to have an account with students signed in under them. These are online spaces where photos and personal information are added. Is Glogster eq endorsed? I'll have to find out!
- students can get carried away with adding too many graphics making it hard to decipher.
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