Here to stay! My favourite teaching apps and websites: Glogster

Part 2 of "Here to stay" series has arrived. In this series of posts I write about apps and websites which I started using at the beginning of online teaching back in March 2020, and which I'm planning to keep in my teaching practise once we're back in the classroom. The first website/app I wrote about was Flipgrid and you can read all about it here. Today's hero: Glogster!

Glogster is a website which lets you create multimedia posters 😍 Basically, imagine you're asking your kids to create a poster. What would they do? They'd get a biggish piece of paper, print and/or cut out some photos and add some writing. With Glogster you do the same thing, but online. So what makes it special? Well, the fact that you can add so much more than just pictures and writing! You can add videos which will play straight from your poster; you can add 3D shapes which you can move around with your cursor; you can add sound, like songs or your own narration; you can add documents, spreadsheets, Flickr images, YouTube videos, Khan Academy videos and SO MUCH MORE! Honestly, the possibilities seem endless to me at this point 😅

The website is brilliant with what it offers to its users and that is why it is not free. There are, however, many different pricing options. See for yourselves

I pay on a monthly basis at this point, but I'm planning to ask the school to get the faculty option.

How it works: as a teacher, you create an account and receive your individual Educator Code. You then create classes and add your students. Students can create their own free accounts. They'll need to know your educator code for that. You can also create accounts for your students and sent them the log-in information. You need to tell your students that once they're in your Glogster class, you'll have access to everything they do there, you can even access their account and change their password or delete their projects. You can do anything you want on their account as if you were them.

Once you've got your students in your classes, it's time to create a project. You can add a title and a description of your project, and you can assign it to a chosen class. Once you click "assign to class", all your students will see this project on their dashboards and you'll see them working on the project. All their personal Glogs will appear in the project tab.

It's now time to create a Glog. Look at all the options you have:

You may add links and upload files from your computer. With the "grab" option you can take pictures and record videos with your computer camera or record audio using your computer microphone. You may embed things from other websites or drag them into your Glog using web picker. You may add YouTube videos (an option which sometimes doesn't work, sadly, I don't know why, but I've made my peace with it), Flickr images and 3D models.

Text tab lets you, obviously, add text. You can play with fonts, colours, and choose from a wide variety of text styles.

In the Graphics tab you'll find loads of Glogster graphics divided into sections, and with the Image option you can upload pictures from the Internet.

Wall tab gives you the option to choose a background for your Glog, again with many many options.

Once you're done working on your Glog, you may save it as a draft to come back to later, you can make it public for everyone to see and reglog (meaning share), you can make it private so that only you can see it. As a teacher, you'll be able to see all your students' Glogs and drafts, even if they set it to private. This means that no one except the teacher and the student will see them.

Glogster lets you create portfolios of your students' best work. Your students can also create presentations of their chosen Glogs. On top of that you have access to Glogpedia with hundreds of various Glogs to work with or get inspiration from. Check it out here. Once you click on any Glog, you'll see how it works. Play with it! Click on images and videos and see what happens 😃

Glogster, to me, is well worth its price. It can be used to create projects for any school subject, not just foreign languages. My favourite part is that you can add narration to it. It's perfect for when you have shy students who don't want to present in front of the whole class. It also works perfectly for projects which are picture heavy without much written text, because the narration option forces language production. No more English projects which look more like Art projects 😉 It's also great for online teaching, because you can avoid the whole "take a picture and send it to me" kerfuffle. If you can spare $5 a month, I highly recommend it!