Just looked at this after your posting.. not sure I can see a useful educational value to it not because of the technology.. which is very nice and inviting to use. But because of the social niche it has amongst females. It appears to be predominantly an attractive site for girls to use. Because of its marketing bias, I would be concerned about using it to try and relate to a whole group of students. I think it could spawn more issues than it solves.
Nice site and web technology though. It would be good to see something similar with wider social bias.
My first glance I thought "scrapbooky". We've used Scrapblog.com and it was the girls who really liked it! Wonder how you could get guys interested in the whole digital design thing?
Yes, Nancy I agree...as a scrapbooker outside of work myself...it could definitely lean towards this idea. But some of the examples I've seen made me think this would be a great resource for teachers.
Check out thisI to read about glogsters new education initiative. Glogster wants to listen to teachers and provide a safe space for kids.
Rizzo goes on to say, "Glogster.com has created a unique web tool that would allow students the ability to easily create a webpage-like 'poster' that can integrate the arts with core curriculum content. Glogster understands my concerns about students only having access to a safe web environment and being able to only view other Glogster.com projects created by students in my school. I applaud them for taking the suggestions of educators and pursuing options that will make this wonderful tool a valuable part of the 21st Century classroom."
Kelley, I didn't really see any differences between the edu version and regular versions? Can't you get at all the same content? I had issues with some of the images they had for graphics and definitely some issues with some of the stuff in the gallery which is why I haven't used it yet.
Kelly, what's the learning curve? I love the look at some of the posters but it looks like many of the compilers have a good sense of design. Can elementary kids put together a poster that doesn't look like a hodgepodge?
I was not sure what it was either- I looked it up on line and found:
Glogster is a social network that allows users to create free interactive posters, or glogs.[1] Glogster was founded in 2007. Currently this social network has hundreds of thousands registered users. The majority of the Glogster community is teenagers.
Glogster provides an environment to design interactive posters. The user inserts text, images, photos, audio (MP3), videos, special effects and other elements into their glogs to generate a multimedia online creation.[2] Glogster is based on flash elements.[3] Posters can be shared with other people. Glogs can also be exported and saved to computer-compatible formats. [4]
It sounds interesting; I think students would enjoy using this program.
Really simple learning curve. Even my second graders play on it at home. The 4th graders did a nice job on the fairy tales unit. The little one's got to put their pictures in the Holiday themes that I choose and had up on the screen.(1st and 2nd) I simply do not allow them in the gallary. One of the email suggestions I made to them was to limit the access to the gallery-or have a seperate gallery for the education site. The more of us that write and request it-the better change we have of it happening. At this point they are at phase I according to their site.
Because color ink is so expensive-sometimes I have the kids take screen shots of their posters and import into Word. That way they can write below the graphic and add the very important writing component.
I agree, the learning curve is quite easy. I will be using this website as part of a presentation I am giving in two weeks on differentiation. I thought this would be a new and different way to present materials to teachers and also expose them to the website. The hardest part for me was figuring how to link pictures and text to another website. I wish there were some kind of directions for this, however, I finally figured it out. But everything else was a piece of cake to pick up.