Glogster.com-+Carrie

Overview: I chose Glogster because I teach fully online courses, and I want students to be able to create and share information about nutrition in unique ways. Students can create a poster through this site as one avenue of sharing. (We sure do get tired on written discussion boards.) When they create a poster following an assignment such as I have linked here, they save it as a jpeg, and then I can gather them all up and paste them on one group Bb page. This offers the capability to look at all the posters at once. Usually, I then have them leave voice comments summing up their poster and that of fellow students. (They do this by using our Voice Thread site that I have linked with the assignment.) (Yes, I paid for a subscription to VT out of my own money…)

Glogster allows text, images, audio and video and web sites as I have shown in my example below. This allows for creativity in that they can use the music they like, link related videos about nutrition and their topic, and explore images that relate. I feel they gain an even stronger connection to the material using this variety of media. It has to beat simply writing a summary about vitamins, no?

How it can be used in an educational setting:   [|ISTC731Glogsterassignment.docx] Here is a sample assignment that I would use in my online nutrition course. [|Here is Glogster] This is the link to Glogster.com. Go ahead and create your own poster!! ﻿    I created a poster with links that I wanted to show here. It would not embed--possibly due to the links? A widget link is attached here. Sorry! media type="custom" key="7033301" A few impressions of this Web 2.0 technology in an educational setting:

While I do value the multimedia approach to applying nutritional concepts in a poster form to share among all classmates, my main concern is that my assignments require APA research and APA citations—both in-text and in reference. And that is hard to include on these types of posters. There may need to be a separate sheet with that referencing citation on it. So that may be a bit of a drawback. Again, after researching and using this site, I would use this as one alternative to a discussion board written discussion and not so much to support extensive research. They can certainly have fun with this, and include research in the text in the poster as required, but perhaps demonstrate APA citation knowledge in another assignment.

As you can see from my sample poster, students can add a variety of links to clarify points and further topic understanding, but from my perspective as the instructor, this may be very time-consuming if I had to look at the appropriateness of each link. To ensure they use appropriate links, I may decide to accept links only from certain sites: CDC, NIH, NCI, NHA, etc. This sort of smacks of behavioral approach however. I would like them to get out there and find interesting and appropriate sites—but just something for educators to keep in mind. Also, at the time of my making this poster, Glogster would not allow me to add web sites to my poster. It allowed youtube links as you've noted, but not any of my credible web sites such as mypyramid.gov or one from the National Cancer Institute. Glogter is a free site and may discriminate at random as it wishes. But not being able to add a credible site is a downfall to educators. I used mainly credible experts who happen to have youtube clips--mainly talking about information in their books, but as you see, I also added a clip from Marilyn Manson about the Food Guide Pyramid.

Additionally, there was a small learning-curve with this web-site, and as per our discussions in class on the characteristics of our students today, many college students are very comfortable with the technologies they know and frequently use, but are somewhat reluctant to try new technologies, especially in an educational setting, and especially in an online environment. For example, on some of my course evaluations, students say that while they appreciated me trying new things (versus just written discussion boards) they often have trouble “figuring out” some of the technologies I have used and they say this is a negative aspect to the course.

To me, that has two implications: one, I question if they are reading thoroughly as I always link tutorials—often very brief, visual ones—so I wonder if they are taking the time to watch and read. (I know this demographic of student hates tutorials.) Second, it sets the stage for me to have to respond to “confused student” emails. As much as I discourage it in my online course, there are always several students each semester who contact me about everything.

Finally, I question the caliber of this site in an academic setting. If you go to the site that I have linked here, you will see some of the poster made by others. The “It Girl” is a perfect example of some to the posters that litter this site—maybe not a bad thing at the college level or maybe even the high school level, but certainly a no for young students. There is a School Glogster, but it costs. Again, just something for educators to keep in mind.