GlogsterEDU Week Continues: Opening Your Account and Starting a Glog with Text!

To continue GlogsterEDU Week, a series of posts on the interactive "poster yourself" website GlogsterEDU, today I am featuring a screencast showing you how to set up an account, obtain student accounts (get 'em while you can for free, even if you don't use them), and start a Glog with text. If you are saying to yourself, "Glog?" a Glog is what you create with Glogster- basically a graphic blog.

Before we go on, I thought of two questions folks might have, so thought they would be good to answer up front.

1. Can you print your Glogs?  Not really.  The idea is that they will live online and you can get to them and display them anytime.   You could print out the webpage that the Glog is on, but I am not sure why you would want to.  It would take an enormous amount of expensive color toner, and would probably look cruddy.  Can you tell I am not a fan of printing?

2. Can you use GlogsterEDU on an iPad? No, because it is Flash-based and iPads do not run Flash.  There are some browsers that allow you to view Flash video, but this is actually a Flash-based interactive composer, so it would not work on an iPad. Let's see what develops there, I bet someday there'll be some sort of an app.

Sorry that the answers to both those questions were No-ish.

So, hope you enjoy the screencast below.  The focus is on getting started and using text boxes, one of the key ways you can make Glogster work for you as speech and language therapy.  Using text boxes, you and/or your students can add the language content to a Glog about any topic or theme.  I think Glogging is a great way to teach kids how to break a topic down in terms of text structure, using Glogster's text tools to create lists, sequences, descriptions, comparisons/contrasts, and cause-effect statements related to a topic (or just work on simple labeling and sentence formulation). Glogster is also a good avenue when you would like to step up kids' thinking beyond that "Knowledge" level of Bloom's Taxonomy.  Check out this list of projects that tap higher-level thinking (and therefore language) skills, many of which would make nice Glogster projects!