Glogster

Glogster is an online poster creation website. This tool allows pupils to create their own posters which they would normally do using drawing paper and other coloring materials. The affordance of Glogster comes in several forms.

For one, the ability to add in images, website and even videos makes normal paper and pen poster pale in comparison. Next would be the ability for everyone to view, rate and comment about the glog. This makes the learning even more interactive and fun.

I’ve used glogster this year for my P5 class mainly to create posters for Science. The latest one I did was for the P5 Science topic on Cells. This was done as a summary to the topic and pupils were to present the types of cells they learnt in class and compare a typical plant and animal cell. I got them to also look for interesting websites that provides additional information about cells. This was an extension to their learning so that they are not confined to only information from the textbook.

As I conducted the lesson, I realized that I needed a structured way of giving the pupils feedback on their posters. I thought that the best way was through the use of a rubric. This ensured that pupils know how to differentiate a great poster from a good poster. In this way, glogster can also be used as an alternative mode of assessment or a performance task. In addition, pupils are also able to peer evaluate their friends’ work. This allows them to improve and refine their glogster based on the feedback given.

The only gripe I have with glogster is that it is not really user friendly especially when I needed to view and comment 40 different glogs. I may have to explore the use of other Web 2.0 tools to enable me to do so in a much more efficient method.