Each visitor can integrate dynamic multi-sensory resources into traditionally text-oriented tasks.
A part of Glogster, the Glogster EDU education project was launched to serve in the educational environment. Education Glogster allows teachers and pupils to use glogs as instructional aids. Users have the option of choosing the freedom of complete expression with Glogster or Glogster EDU with teacher controls.
History
Glogster was launched in December 2007 and Glogster EDU in October 2009. Since its founding, Glogster has experienced rapid growth and now has users in more than 200 countries and territories. Even though the portal is targeted primarily at young people, many of the users are aged 25 or over. At present, there are over 2.8 million glogs on the website.At the time of its establishing Glogster was inspired partly by classic paper posters and generally by the worldwide poster pop-culture of teenagers. At that time boring and “orthogonal” internet was another inspiration. The objective was to enable people to turn something, to enable unlimited creative self-expression.
In 2011 Glogster has offices in Boston, Prague, Colombo, Singapore, Tokyo and Silicon Valley.
Glogster EDU
The growing popularity of Glogster helped spawn Glogster EDU to assist teachers in providing dynamic and interactive teaching experiences. The EDU Glogster project is intended primarily for pupils and teachers in primary and secondary schools.
Teachers privately register their students and may create a safe virtual class with as many as two hundred students. Teaching glogs are private and are made accessible to others at the discretion of the teacher. Glogster EDU is a kind of learning management system. Teachers can create projects with their students cross other schools. Moreover, the Glogs may be developed under various categories, such as, for example, mathematics, or physics, for example http://edu.glogster.com/glogpedia/. During a lesson teachers respond and assess pupils’ works. The platform is secure, as it may be accessed only by a teacher who may fully supervise his/her students’ activities and determine which Glogs go public and thus create an online digital encyclopedia with educational content.
Glogster EDU comes in two versions: EDU Basic, which is free and EDU Premium, which is paid. The key difference is in the number of students, management of students, projects, class and sharing of students all across the schools and a number of further functions, such as, for example, drawing in Glog, the possibility of uploading data into Glog, or the possibility of using special Glogster EDU Premium media galleries.
Glogster EDU is currently being used by 380,000 teachers with over 6,000,000 students all around the world.
In the near future, the EDU Glogster development team will design and release an enhanced version of Glogster EDU 2.0 which should further meet the basic mission of this site to educate young students and prepare them to use the benefits of the Internet and multimedia applications.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glogster
Benefits
Expand Digital Literacy Glogster EDU creates a digital learning environment, where teachers and students learn technology in an easy to use and scalable format that simplifies the educational process and produces assessable multi-modal results across the curriculum spectrum.Enable Standards Mastery
Glogster EDU enables public or private schools, districts, states, and education institutions of all kinds, to meet and exceed educational technology and content area standards for creativity and innovation, communication and collaboration, research and information fluency, critical thinking, problem solving and decision making, and digital citizenship.
Promote Independent Problem Solving
Glogster EDU creates an adaptable and innovative learning environment for all learners, regardless the age, gender, culture or learning style. Students are encouraged to be independent, inventive problem solving and lifelong learners.
Demonstrate Understanding of Curriculum Objectives
The Glogster EDU format encourages students to express independent and creative thought, and be competent and confident problem solvers. Glog-based teaching and learning strategies facilitate such development, and open possibilities for designing new curricula to meet education objectives.
Fulfill UDL Principles
Glogster EDU’s platform fulfills the UDL Principles of: Multiple means of representation, to give diverse learners options for acquiring information and knowledge, Multiple means of action and expression, to provide learners options for demonstrating what they know, Multiple means of engagement, to tap into learners' interests, offer appropriate challenges, and increase motivation.
Enhance Formative and Summative Assessments
Glogster EDU enhances the connections among curriculum, instruction, and assessment methods. Glogster EDU will increase the efficiency of summative assessments and expand the scope and nature of formative assessments.
Provide Differentiated Instructional Activities
Glogster EDU’s differentiated format promotes a positive balance between acquisition of factual knowledge, the mastery of concepts and skills, and the imaginative use of multi-media and relevant Internet resources
Features
Glog Creation Interface A Glog is created using a very easy to understand, drag and drop interface that is relevant, enjoyable, and scalable for students of all ages and learning styles. A Glog is an interactive visual platform in which users create a “poster or web page” containing multimedia elements including: text, audio, video, images, graphics, drawings, and data.Create Curriculum Based Projects for Classes, Groups, Teams, or Individuals
The teacher can continue working with students through remote instruction, or also in a classic classroom using this multimedia platform – a community system for sharing is prepared where student‘s work is stored and available at any time. The teacher creates projects with templates and instructional guidelines, assigns them to the students, provides feedback throughout the assignment, and assesses their finished work.
Glog Presentations! Share student or teacher projects in Class, School, District or Beyond Once projects are complete, the teacher can share students work in a variety of educational settings. Glogs can be embedded in a blog, wiki, or web page or shared with others utilizing Glogster EDU’s innovative presentation capabilities. Choose exemplar student projects and demonstrate student’s achievements with parents, administrators, students, and other educators.
Private and Safe Learning Environment for Teachers and Students
The teacher easily creates a private virtual classroom with students by registering for a teacher administered account, generating student accounts with safe logins and passwords, and monitoring all activities within the account throughout the learning process. Student accounts can be created without providing email addresses or other contact information of the children. The Teacher’s Dashboard provides direct access to all students, projects, and other activities.
Single Multi-Subject and Class Dashboards for Teachers and Students with One Login and Password
All educators utilizing Glogster EDU’s inventive platform, have direct access to individual students through a single portal – the Teacher’s Dashboard. Not only can teachers see all students’ activities within their own Teacher Dashboard, each student can also easily view and manage all of their classes and projects within their Student Dashboard. A single login and password will provide each teacher and student with complete access to multiple classroom activities. In the near future, Administrators will have a unique, secure login access for monitoring entire district or state-level Glogster EDU activities.
The videos in the Pronunciation Tips section of this site are presented by Alex Bellem.