Glogster

I had never heard of the Glogster site until I saw it on Sarah's blog.  I was intrigued with the projects she shared that she had had her class complete.  I am a huge scrapbooker, so looking at the glog, it immediately made me think of an online scrapbooking activity.  I thought this could be a great opportunity for the students to use text, images, video, pictures, and more to express ideas.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I love to get to the bottom of the features available with the glog.  I decided to create a summary of a book one of my reading groups read recently.  My students recently read My Name is Brain Brain.  This websites allows you to use a variety of papers, icons, animated icons, pictures, video, and sound.

Here is a picture of what I created:

I'm sure my kids could do better, but I truly enjoyed looking through all of the different options of how to present my summary. 

I can imagine using this program for a wide variety of subjects and topics.  This can be used to create a study guide for each social studies unit, a end of a novel activity, a math problem, and much more.  This site can be used safely for students with the right precautions.  You can set your glogs to private, so that they are not available for others to view. 

Overall I am very excited to bring this website to my team to see what we can pull together.  I am sure my students will be as excited as I am!

Blogging for Students

So to me the most logical dive into Web 2.0 tools would be for me to explore this: blogging.  In the many different classes we've taken we have discussed somewhat how to use blogs with your students.  While the ideas are endless some of the tools can be overwhelming.  As a techie type person, I always want to use each tool to the best of it's ability.  I want to know what all of the gizmos and gadgets due.  So when I first started this site, I looked at each option available.

The design template was really fun to play with.  With students they respond to things that are aesthetically pleasing, it is exciting to browse all of the different options:

Once you've selected how your blog is going to look, blogspot offers many different gadgets, that can help your students or keep people interested in what you're blogging about:

There are gadgets that show links to fellow bloggers or it allows for images or text.  These gadgets are great tools because depending on what you are using your blog for you can show pictures of books, science experiments, maps, etc.  You can also include hyperlinks or videos of something that relates to your blogs.  Really the blog allows you to provide everything you need to help a student from home at their convenience.

In a previous course, we explored blogs like I stated.  We looked specifically at edublogs.com.  Last year I was in a second grade class and I had trouble really thinking about how to get the students to use the blog.  I just created a blog for my fourth grade students.  Each month our grade participates in Pizza Hut's Book It program.  The students are asked to read 400 minutes per month.  With reading 400 minutes, they are exposed to many different books.  I thought creating a blog for the students to share books they've read, books they'd recommend, or provide a place to discuss books with classmates who read that book too.

Blogging

So my experience with blogging is very limited.  I am aware of what a blog is and how it can be used in an educational setting as well as for personal reasons.  I haven't really ever felt the need to use one as I teach in elementary school and I was teaching second graders.  While most second graders probably could use a blog, I just didn't see where I could use it.  Also that required a lot of planning and permission slips and I will admit I can be pretty lazy at times. 

Meanwhile that is totally not where I wanted to go with my first post.  I wanted to talk about my experience with creating this blog.  Now I love gadgets and playing around with the newest technology until I have a better understanding of it, but WOW there were many things going on with the making of this blog.  It all started off pretty basic with choosing a title for the blog, creating a web address and so on.  This was all easily completed.  When I actually got to the personalizing of the blog was when I was on visual overload. 

Blogger has about a million different gadgets you can have on your blog and I was not sure what half of them did.  Most of the ones I chose to have on this blog were chosen because I liked the graphic next to their description.  That's how technical I am.  "Oooh look at that pretty picture."  My goal before my next post will be to actually use these gadgets in order to make my blog more efficient.  Wish me luck!