GlogsterEDU Week: Make your Glog Interactive with Links, Audio and Video!

For part 4 of Glogster EDU week (a.k.a. Thursday) here is a screencast covering some of the interactive features of Glogging: adding audio, video, and links to other web pages.  The audio/video aspects are ones that are very applicable to SLPs, as they allow us to work on listening skills and/or speech and language production in a manner that will be engaging to students!  Check out the screencast below, and learn why not all Schoolhouse Rock videos have stood the test of time.

More GlogsterEDU Week!

Today's post in this series on GlogsterEDU, an online "poster" creator, covers adding the "G" to your Glog- graphics and images.  In this screencast I show how to save an image from a webpage and upload it to your Glog in order to add visual support.  In the video, I touch on the issue of Fair Use of images, so here's a reference if you want to learn about that further.  The steps shown in this screencast can also be used for any online image (e.g. on a webpage rather than through Google Image Search) or any other image file saved to your computer.

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!

Welcome to GlogsterEDU Week!

I have been meaning to write about GlogsterEDU for some time, but have put it off because, though a wonderful and easy resource to use, it requires a series of posts to really do it justice. It was hard to commit. But here we go- It's GlogsterEDU week on SpeechTechie!

GlogsterEDU is a free (with some nice paid features) site based on the concept of "poster yourself." Yes, the idea is to offer an online, electronic and easy-to-use poster-maker for teachers and students to publish their cool creations related to the curriculum. Glogster started out more as a social network for teens and still exists that way, (like blogging, but graphic, hence the name) but has wisely embraced the education market and is fast becoming an extremely popular alternative to "Death by PowerPoint" assignments in schools.

Why Posters? We've probably all tried a poster project with our students at some point. Posters are a fun and engaging project to embark on with students, and clearly are language-based, what with their ability to incorporate lots of information and visuals. However, they can be prohibitively time-consuming if one wishes to have the kids design anything worth displaying, and with our population frequently having fine-motor issues limiting their writing and drawing skills...it can be tough. GlogsterEDU provides an interface that allows students (and teachers) to create well-designed projects in a fraction of the time of a traditional poster. Additionally, as a 21st-century poster-creator, GlogsterEDU allows you to embed audio, video, and links to websites to make your project truly interactive.  The main idea for SLPs is that GlogsterEDU can be one way to organize your visuals, text and links for an activity, series of activities, or theme, or help students to consolidate their learning about a topic in a graphic and engaging way!

This week, I am going to be covering GlogsterEDU with screencasts on how to use it, and a number of examples of how it can be used in SLP practice. To begin with, let's check out their "Best of" gallery, itself a Glog. Click around and explore the categories below to see what's possible with GlogsterEDU! Some of my favorites after exploring these examples:

A Night at the Museum: Students produce first-person narratives from the POV of famous people!

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss: A good example of how a Glog can provide a context to explore a topic, and a landing page for students to direct their own learning.

The Outsiders: A Glog can be an engaging way to summarize, highlight story grammar and visualize any book.

What Can You See Underwater: Glogs are a great way to explore and break down the language of any curriculum area and focus on categories.

And best of all, GlogsterEDU so easy to use, you'll be able to involve students in the process of creating Glogs. Tune in this week to see how!

So, here's the plan:
Tuesday: How to set up your Glogster account, create a new Glog and add text.
Wednesday: Adding images and graphics.
Thursday: Adding links, audio and video.
Fri: A few last features and some more examples and ideas of Glogs related to SLP practice (If you have any you'd like to share, please email me!)

Please Take this Short Survey

Please help out my pal and #SLPeep Barbara Fernandes of Geek SLP by taking this short survey about your use of iDevices (iPad/iPod/iPhone) if you are a school-based Speech-Language Pathologist.  Barbara sends her thanks!

A Touch of Class

A Touch of Class is a simple, fun game challenging students to classify animals according to specific characteristics:

A little robot runs through after you make your choices, awarding or subtracting points based on what you missed. This activity will create a lot of discussion and suspense, aligning well with curriculum topics and strategies around descriptive schema.

Your Recommendations on iPad Cases?

We work with a population that often leads us to be reluctant to hand over our breakable things, such as an iPad. Especially when using apps that incorporate movement and, sometimes, shaking of said iPad. Susan H. inquired on the SpeechTechie Facebook Page:

I would love to know your thoughts on iPad cases. They seem necessary with the school aged population. Currently my case only forms an easel in landscape, but I would love it to do portrait also for those apps that don't flip. Also my case is taking a licking- Recommendations appreciated!

I am reluctant to offer a recommendation at this time, only having bought the original Apple iPad case. Which I am reluctant to recommend. It may be the one that Susan is speaking of, actually, and though I have used it very gently, somehow looks nothing like the picture here:

Instead, it looks like I regularly sneeze on it full-force (I don't).

I have heard really good things about The Defender (see review on Speech Gadget here), but it doesn't seem to be what Susan has in mind in terms of stand-up-in-portrait mode capabilities.  So besides recommending that Susan consult the TiPB store (a good resource associated with an independent blog about all things iOS), I am going to throw it out to you, SpeechTechies.  Do you have a case in mind for Susan (oh, and Susan, do you have an original iPad or iPad 2)?  Do you all have anything to say about cases in general?  Please provide links where possible.  Thanks!

"There's an App for That"

Check out this very clever number from Sesame Street, "There's an App for That"

If you are using iOS devices with your students, this would be great fun to share with them. As a language-based project, perhaps have them "design" an app, with icon and description (working on the descriptive element of function) and place it on a big "iPod" bulletin board in your office.

HubBub Games

HubBub Games is a resource you might want to explore and bookmark for younger students or those with earlier developmental skills.  The Hub is apparently a TV network with a variety of kids' shows, and this site is a selection of interactives related to the programs and characters.  There are a whole bunch of games that would allow for multiple trials and visits in order to build concepts and skills.  To take just a few:

Jumping Adventure Game- Select a colored ramp to jump a truck, click to make it flip multiple times in the air, watch it land, drag the mouse to wash it all off (starters such as 1-2-3-Go, turn taking, "all clean")

3 Babies Game- Attend to a baby's requests (delivered via thought balloon) and take care of her needs for milk, sleep, diaper changes, and play (Wh-Questions, up/down, temporal words such as after/now).

Build a Burger- Using a Play-Doh Machine (!) deliver food to kids in a cafeteria as ordered (colors, shapes, food items, how questions, happy/sad).

Each of these interactives would be a good preview to working on pretend play with actual trucks, dolls, or Play-Doh.

What else did you find on the site that might be useful to SLPs? Let us know in the comments.

Portable PD, Part Two

Last week I posted about Flipboard, an iPad app that lets you take your favorite "feeds" (Twitter, Facebook, etc) on the go with you.  I mentioned that it is not my preferred way to view my Google Reader blogs, because I like to look at them individually and not all mashed up!  My favorite way to view Reader is actually at reader.google.com, but if I am on the train or reclining somewhere, I do like Reeder for both iPhone and iPad.  Reeder lets you review everything that has been posted recently in a particular blog and syncs the items you read back to Google Reader, so that when you return to the web interface you will know what you looked at!  Additionally, you can star items that you know you want to bookmark or think about in more depth later (something you can also do with Flipboard).  Reeder sets you back a few bucks ($2.99/$4.99 for iPhone and iPad, respectively, and it's worth getting both if you have both) but is definitely a good item to have on your iDevice.

I love the way Reeder's interface lets you tap, scroll, and pull to move to the next post