Return to Glogster

We have been studying colonization to Texas. As a way of trying to help students remember the famous people and vocabulary students made a Glogster. The technical difficulties we had at the beginning of the year have been resolved. Every now and then something weird happens when using Glogster. One student dragged an image onto his wall and for some reason he had an abundant supply of arrows. It was almost like the drag a copy action in Inspire. Students did ask if they could make an Animoto instead.... I told them for our next project they can make an Animoto.

Students will be researching a famous Texan who fought in the Texas Revolution or was one of the famous Old Three Hundred. Students will then create an Animoto--they are excited to get an opportunity to use Animoto again. One thing I really like about Animoto is that it can be done so quickly Glogster are more time intensive and take several days to complete depending upon how fancy the Glog is. I find it interesting that students prefer Animoto over Glogster-- it must be the music video feel to it.

Glogster Success

After emailing Glogster I was able to get the needed information to send to our tech department to unfilter Glogster. It was much faster loading Glogster and my students were able to finish their Explorer projects! They commented at how fast it was now. For this project we focused on using images and text. For our next glog I hope to have my students embed video clips.

Glogster

For our explorer project my students researched an explorer then created a Glog to share that information with students. Originally I planned on giving them just a week to find the information and put together their Glogs. Things did not go quite as planned because of the many loading issues we are experiencing with Glogster. Several students have lost their work because when trying to save it somehow the screen gets stuck and you just see it "loading" after 10 minutes I told them to just exit out of Internet Explorer. For some students this wasn't a big deal since they didn't have too much on their Glog, however, for one or two students they were almost done! One student had to start over 4 times and yesterday asked if he could do an alternative assignment not using Glogster. I told him we are going to try again Monday. Karen suggested I try using Glogster as a station and only have 4-5 students on it at a time... we still experienced the same issue. I have emailed Glogster and I am waiting for a respose. I have had 3 students finish their Glogs successfully.We were just hoping and crossing our fingers when it came time to save.

As we begin using more and more Web 2.0 tools we need to make sure our district servers and computers can handle it. I love Glogster, however, now I am more relunctant to use it again due to all of the problems. For the next project I need to have a plan A and a plan B in the event something goes wrong.

Glogster

My students will be using Glogster for their Explorer project this year instead of doing it on regular posterboard. They needed to explore Glogster on before using it for their project, so their assignment was to create a glog all about themselves. Students loved Glogster and many continued working on their Glogs from home.

I'm glad we were able to explore beforehand because we found out that sometimes it will keep loading and loading and nothing happens. Students also found out the hard way sometimes it does not save. While saving it continued to load and load with no final message saying it was saved. I wasn't sure if this problem was a "Glogster problem" or a problem with our connection.

I told my students that when they start their Explorer glog they will need to save often!! It was a good learning experience for them. Keep checking back for their Explorer glogs.