Organizational Tool Post #3

           For this tool I chose to do "sharing images" so I set up an account on Glogster. I played around on this site for hours and had a good time making a poster about myself to share with my class. Navigating around the site and creating the poster was actually pretty easy, but part of what took extra time was waiting for things to load.

Glogster calls itself a 'visual social network' and you can sign up via Facebook or start a new account. They also had a connection to "Glogster Edu" which is where I went to sign on. They had a free trial or for $30 you could get a classroom account for up to 50 students. I went with the free trial, however when I was navigating around the site there were some applications that I could not use without paying.

I often start the year with my students creating poems and riddles about themselves and connect these to some self-portraits. I was thinking that using this idea students might be able to do one of these assignments on the computer, integrating their poem with photos and creating a poster.

Creating a poster (or a Glog) was really pretty simple. You have several choices to start - graphics, text, images, video, sound, draw and wall. I uploaded photos in 'images' then added frames, adjusted the size and moved them around the page. Next I added text in the form of titles, bubbles and stickers. I could easily change the font, size or color. Then I added graphics.

My concern with doing this for students is how to upload photos of them to use. I believe I could easily link the beginning of year photos I always take of each student, but it would be nice if they have more than one photo to use and I am not sure how to do that at school.

Another thought is to have each student make a classroom poster with some of the typical reminders we usually post around the room: ie: “The SUM is the answer to an addition problem." or "Remember to indent at the start of every new paragraph." In this case it would be fun for them to add their photo, and one photo would be plenty. They could then add graphics to make the rest of the poster exciting.