This academic year I have been trialling using Glogster, a multimedia online poster creation tool, to assess writing and speaking in the target language – click the play icon next to the bird near the bottom left of the above poster.
Glogster posters, or Glogs, are a wonderful way of encouraging writing, speaking and creativity using technology. Generally, students have enjoyed the tasks I have set them using this tool and they have been looking forward to my setting new tasks using Glogster, often demanding to know when they will be going to the ICT room to start the next one (I have noticed, however, that few of my students have actually created Glogs for their own, personal use, but that’s another story…).
Although Glogster has the potential of becoming an indispensable tool for a teacher’s reservoir of online activities, it has often been plagued by small niggly problems such as losing work when Glogs haven’t saved properly or the bane of every languages teacher: difficulty in getting accented characters (å é î ø ü, for example) to appear on the Glogs.
Fortunately, Glogster has appointed a new Education Manager, Jim Dachos, who kindly introduced himself to Glogster users by way of comment on a previous post here on Box of Tricks. Hopefully, his arrival will mean that feature requests and suggestions from us teachers will be taken into account more readily and that any problems will be looked into with his help. Please get in touch with him with your comments and suggestions here http://www.glogster.com/edu/
Embedding Glogs
One of the advantages of using Glogster is that posters created by your students can be showcased to a potentially worldwide audience. However, one of the most common problems teachers have reported to me has been the difficulty in embedding the Glogs into classroom blogs or wikis, given the sheer size of the online posters.
Below is a quick quide about how you can embed Glogs into other websites, like blogs or wikis, allowing you to change their size so that they fit wherever you need to embed them:
- When viewing your Glog in Glogster, find these options near the bottom right, immediately underneath your poster:
- Then click the second option Embed into your page to access the embed code which you then need to copy and paste into your blog or wiki:
- Finally, before you save any changes to your website, change the highlighted values to whatever size you need:
These values tell your blog or wiki how big you want the Glog to be:
- scale=”100″ means 100%, that is full size. Change the value to 50 for a half size Glog
- width=”960″ and height=”1300″ govern the width and height, obviously.
Important: If you change the scale you must change the width and height accordingly, otherwise all sorts of strange things begin to happen. For example, if you change the scale to 50, you must also change the width to 480 and the height to 650. This way the scale, width and height remain in proportion.
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This post is tagged Embedding, glogster, multimedia
Thanks for the tip. It used to be a big phobia for me. ‘Step AWAY from the HTML code!’ Guess it’s not as scary as I thought.
My students use blogger as the platform for their efolios, mostly so we can embed 3rd parties like voicethread and a similar glogster tool – scrapblog. This will help with the download problem and could be a good lead into getting them familiar with the code. – first step for all of us!
I used to be afraid of meddling with html code (still am for the most part!) but we all learn by getting things wrong first time round… don’t we?
And thank you for reminding us about about Scrapblog!
Thank you for the tips, they are very useful. I used glogster with year 11 (15 years old) to produce a poster about their dream and nightmare jobs. They also filmed themselves and added the video to their glogs and they loved it! The only problem was the use of accents (they didn’t add accents to their texts) and how to embed the glogs to the school blog I set up. So your post is of great use to me, thank you
I bought a Flip Video Mino digital camera
last Friday with the aim of getting my students to record themselves speaking in the target language, so that the video could then be incorporated into tools like Glogster. I would love to see what your students got up to… any links?
The problem is because they filmed themselves, their glogs are still set on private until I obtain consent from their parents to show their glogs public. Hopefully, after Easter I can send you the links!
By the way, I look forward to your feedback on the Flip camera. I am thinking of buying one for the department.
Hi there Jose, or rather José
Thanks for pointing this one out! After reading your last Glogster post I decided to try it out with my students, with pretty good results in the main. Check out their FL Biology glogs here: Our Biology Glogs.
I can totally agree that the students loved creating them and put some real time and effort into their work. It was really nice to see how inspiring they found it all.
We did have some real problems though too. Almost half the class (including the “best” student in the class) lost their work when Glogster didn’t save. I must admit at the time I decided I wouldn’t use them again as I thought it unfair. However, if they’ve got a dedicated Ed tech person now, maybe it’s worth trying again.
So Glogster:
+ great motivation and simple to create
- frustrating for the sts when it goes wrong
= a tool well worth a second chance.
Best,
Seth
Yes Seth, I had experienced similar problems just a couple of weeks ago when two boys lost their work and, like you, I felt very frustrated (as did the boys!). As I say above, I think Glogster has the potential of becoming an essential tool in my tool box… as long as they iron out a few creases…
It’s great. but if you have a class working on their Glogs, they take forever (in one case 40 minutes) to load up. I know that’s not Glogster’s fault, or is it their problem for that matter, but it’s just a heads-up to all those about to start using it on school networks.
Put the kettle on…
Hello Alex,
I hear your preso at the Languages World went very well, I have favourited it on Slideshare
To be fair, however, I think those problems, as you indicate, have nothing to do with Glogster, but rather with hopelessly obsolete internet connections at our schools that cannot handle more than one YouTube video at a time…. hang on… we wouldn’t know, would we? YouTube is probably blocked! Oh well, that’s a rant for another day…
Thanks for the tips. However I would like to not only decrease the size of the poster but have it as a thumbnail of say 20% that opened to a larger size that could be easily read. That way I could incorporate many posters on the one wiki page. Could you please direct me to instructions for this? My school has Macs. Thanks
Dear Cathy,
Thanks for your comment. The instructions above would allow you to do just what you describe. Copy the embed code from Glogster but change the scale to 20, the width to 192 and the height to 260 as outlined above. That should do it.
Alternatively you could grab a snapshot of the glog in question using something like Skitch, resize it to your requirements and then insert the resized picture(s) into your wiki.
Then you only need to hyperlink each picture to its full size glog using your wiki’s toolbar in editing mode.
Hope that helps. Other than that, I am not sure what to suggest, perhaps Glogster themselves have a better option.
Re: accent marks for foreign language classes. I discovered that if you choose the Arial font, you have access to accent marks. Of course, it’s the most boring of all the fonts, but at least it works.
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I am trying to embed my Glogster into Google Earth 5. I have seen others use this sucessfully, but depending on which code I copy and paste, either the wheels spin forever without loading or the glog post, but it is no longer interactive. Any help would be appreciated!
Jose,
I’m just starting to experiment with Glogster, so your post is invaluable. I had the good luck to hear Jim Dachos speak this summer at a DEN workshop and was impressed with his commitment to make Glogster a teacher-friendly tool. Also at the workshop and presenting her glog work with younger students was Traci Blazosky (Jim D refers to Traci as the Glogster goddess). Don’t know if you’ve seen her http://www.ktitraci.wikispaces.com site, but it’s also a great resource.
I’m in the process of gathering links to K-12 glogs across the curriculum, blogroll style. I’ll keep checking your blog,
Gail
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I can’t upload my glog to my class website…. it is a site I created through google..help!
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Thank you very much for the post! Your tips helped me upload my Glog to my blog correctly! I was also able to change the size of the glog. Thank you again for the tips!
Attempting to embed Glogster into wikispaces. I can changed the height and width but the scale factor is missing from the embed code. Any suggestions?
Dear Linda, I’ve just tried the embed instructions above. The scale factor does appear ok for me. José