Three Alternatives to Glogster

This morning I received an email from a reader who was looking for an alternative to Glogster. For those not familiar with Glogster, it was a darling of the ed tech world about six or seven years ago when it empowered users to make free multimedia collages. Teachers everywhere had students making multimedia collages to summarize topics, events, and books. Glogster was free for a while then shifted to a subscription model. Here are three tools that your students can use to create multimedia collages.

Buncee:
Buncee is essentially an online slideshow. But you can save your Buncee offline as an interactive PDF which makes it a great way for students to build ebooks. A Buncee can also be used as an online invitation to an event. When you have completed the creation of your Buncee you can select "RSVP" when you share it and recipients will have an option to register their interest in attending your event.

Within Buncee there is an integrated image search which pulls images from Bing. The search is filtered for Creative Commons licensed images. Any image that a student chooses to use in his or her Buncee is automatically added to a list of citations.

Buncee has a huge catalog of stock images and animations that students can add to their slides. During the demonstration that I saw, a running dog animation was added to a slide. That animation played on a continuous loop until the slides were advanced.



Adobe Spark:
Adobe Spark is a suite of free tools for creating images, videos, and simple web pages. Adobe Spark can be used in your web browser or you can download the Adobe Spark video, image, and web page iPad apps. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to create images, web pages, and videos with Adobe Spark in your web browser.

Key features of Adobe Spark's web app include an integrated Creative Commons image search tool, the option to download images as JPEGs, and the option to download your videos as MP4 files.



Pic-Collage:
Creating collages can be a good way for students to organize their thoughts in a visual manner. In creating their collages they are organizing images that may later become writing prompts for them. I've had students create collages as a way to summarize field trips. Pic Collage is the app that I like for doing that activity. Pic Collage is a free app available for Android and iOS devices. The collage you see above is a very basic use of the app on my Android phone.

After creating a collage students can add interactive elements to it by using Thinglink. Watch the two videos that I made and embedded below to learn how to use Pic-Collage and ThingLink to create interactive collages.




Disclosure: Buncee is a client of MindRocket Media Group. I am a minority partner in MRMG.

Five Alternatives to Traditional Book Reports

On Tuesday evening I gave a presentation in Second Life for school librarians and media specialists. One of the topics that I talked about was alternatives to traditional book report assignments. While this post is a follow-up to that presentation, the post on its own should give you some ideas for alternatives to traditional book report assignments.

1. Create book trailers. I ran a post about book trailers during the summer which you can read here. In short, a book trailer is a short video created by students to highlight the key points of a book. When creating their book trailers students should be trying to "sell" viewers on a book. To create their videos your students could use Animoto for Education, JayCut, or PhotoPeach. Learn more about these free video creation tools in my free guide Making Videos on the Web.

2. Create animated or stop-motion videos about a book's plot. To make an animated video try Memoov which is a free service that your students can use to create an animated video book review. Memoov allows users to create animated videos up to five minutes in length. Creating an animated video with Memoov can be as simple as selecting a setting image(s), selecting a character or characters, and adding dialogue.

If stop-motion videos are more your speed, Kevin Hodgson's Making Stopmotion Movies is a fantastic resource for directions and advice on making stop-motion movies.

3. Create literature maps. Using Google Maps or Google Earth students can map out the travels of character in a story. Google Lit Trips has many examples of teachers and students using Google Earth in literature courses. If you're not familiar with how to create placemarks in Google Maps, please see my free guide Google for Teachers for directions.

4. Create 3D augmented reality book reviews. ZooBurst is an amazing service that allows you to create a short story complete with 3D augmented reality pop-ups. Students could use ZooBurst to create short summaries of books that really jump off the screen.

5. Create multimedia collages about books. Glogster allows users to create one page multimedia collages. Students could create a collage containing videos, audio files, text, and images about books they've read. For example, a Glog about Into the Wild could contain images of Chris McCandless, chunks of text about the book, and this video featuring a song from the movie based on the book.

Wikispaces Makes it Easier to Embed Glogs

Those people whose students have created Glogster Glogs (multimedia collages) and use Wikispaces probably already know that Wikispaces pages are a great way to display student work. The process for embedding a Glog into a Wikispaces page used to require users to copy the Glogster html code then paste it into Wikispaces using the "embed other html" widget. The process just got a lot simpler.

In a blog post today Wikispaces announced that they now fully support the embedding of Glogs through a new option in the Wikispaces widgets menu. Now when you open the widget menu in your Wikispaces editor you will see a logo for Glogster EDU. Click the Glogster EDU logo, log into your Glogster account, select your Glog, click insert, save your work and you're done. Glogster Edu has a tutorial of the process that you can view here.

Here are some related items that may be of interest to you:
Glogster Video Tutorial
Glogster EDU Resource Library
How-to Week - Day 1 - Using Wikispaces

Glogster Video Tutorial

Glogster is a great tool that students can use to create multimedia collages. I've written about Glogster on a number of occasions in the past (examples here, here, and here). One of Glogster's strongest supporters is Traci Blazosky who created an excellent video tutorial that walks teachers through the process of using Glogster. Watch the video below.



Applications for Education
Glogster is a great tool for having students create collages of information they've found and or created. Students can combine videos, images, text, and audio into one online display that can stand alone or be embedded into a blog, website, or wiki. This fall some of my Civics students will be creating Glogster "glogs" about the candidates running for political office this fall.

Glogster EDU Resource Library

Glogster has just announced some new services for users of Glogster EDU. Among the services available to users of the free platform are new categories for Glogs that should make it easier to search for examples of academic uses of Glogster. Glogster has also launched a forum for teachers to share ideas and best practices for using Glogster in their classrooms. Glogster is calling the forum GLab.

Glogster has also released a PDF guide for educators interested in using Glogster in their classrooms. The Glogster Educator Resource Library is a free 29 page PDF containing lesson plans and examples of Glogster used in classrooms. The lesson plans come with scoring rubrics are are aligned to national standards. The Glogster Educator Resource Library also contains links to additional sites offering media that can be use in Glogs.

Learn more about Glogster EDU in these posts.
The New Glogster EDU is Live
Just in Time for School - Glogster EDU
Glogster Announces Changes to EDU Accounts

Glogster Announces Changes to Edu Accounts

Popular multimedia collage service Glogster has recently announced some changes to their free education accounts. Currently, the free version of Glogster Edu gives teachers the ability to create and manage up to 200 student accounts. Starting on March 1, 2010 Glogster will limit the free edu accounts to 100 student accounts. However, if you sign up by February 28, 2010 you can still get the version that gives you the ability to create and manage 200 student accounts. So if you've been considering using Glogster in your classroom, sign up now for a free account.

If you're not familiar with Glogster, here are some previous posts you may want to review:

A Gallery of Glogs

A Great Glogster Tutorial

Help Glogster Get Better

Glogster Edu, a multimedia collage service that I really like, is looking for feedback from educators who have used it or tried to use it in their classrooms. Glogster Edu has published a short survey in which they're seeking feedback about how Glogster is used in education and what obstacles to using it in education exist. If you have a minute or two, I'm sure they'd appreciate your feedback.

Here are some posts about Glogster that I've previously written:
A Great Glogster Tutorial
Coming Soon from Glogster
The New Glogster Edu is Live
A Gallery of Glogs

A Gallery of Glogs

Glogster, a service that I've written about a few times in the past, is a great way to bring poster projects into the 21st century. Using Glogster students can create multimedia collages about anything. One of Glogster's employees, Jim Dachos (a former Maine teacher) has compiled a great list of examples of Glogster being used in academic settings. Jim has examples covering the whole spectrum of educational applications for Glogster from elementary school through high school. You can see Jim's list here.

Thanks to Lee Kolbert for the link to Jim's list.

Applications for Education
Glogster provides a good way to transition a 20th Century poster project into a 21st Century multimedia project. If you have colleagues that are reluctant to use web-based technology in their classrooms, Glogster can be a good first step for them to take. Share Jim's list with those reluctant colleagues to give them an idea of some the great things kids can do with Glogster.

Here are some related items that may be of interest to you:
A Great Glogster Tutorial
Coming Soon from Glogster
The New Glogster Edu is Live