Famous Inventors Glogster

Here is the Glogster I made for my 4th graders to use to learn about famous inventors we are studying in social studies. I love that I can embed Discovery streaming clips into the glog for my students to view on their own.

Congratulations to Helen

In December one of our blogging buddies, Connor, put forth a Glogster challenge. Nine students in our class were able to complete their glogs in time to enter the contest. Today when I fired up TweetDeck this tweet greeted me.

The link in the tweet took me to this post by Mrs. Ripp, Connor's teacher. Thanks to Twitter and Comments4Kids our two classes have connected this year. It is great to see how these connections can help our students' work be seen beyond our classroom walls.

Congratulations, Helen. Your great work has been recognized by others too.

Glogster

I introduced Glogster to my students two days before the Christmas holidays. I did a very short demonstration on some aspects of how to build an online poster using Glogster and then turned them lose to explore and create. I didn't not set up an expected outcome for this exploration time. I just told them to create a glog about Christmas. I put together a Glogster to showcase some of their work and also added it to the award winning Greetings from the World wiki so that they could be viewed by a wider audience. We also entered a Glogster challenge put together by a student in Mrs. Ripp's class. Thanks, Connor for putting forward this challenge.

When we return from the winter break, they will be making Glogsters about what they are learning in our geometry unit in math.

End of the School Year

Well school is out for the summer. It is hard to believe this school year is over. As usual I ran out of time to accomplish all of the projects I wanted to do. But our last three weeks of school were so much fun as we finished our PowerPoint slideshows, Glogsters, and PhotoStory digital math videos. I loved how the students became experts on certain aspects of using the computer programs or Web 2.0 tools, and helped others as they ran into technical difficulties.

My principal enjoyed coming into my classroom and watching my students all working in pairs on their laptops creating their various projects. My student teacher for next fall was so excited when she came to observe and saw all that was happening with technology in my classroom. She said one of her classmates has been assigned to a teacher who only as an overhead projector (how sad).

Here are a few examples of their projects.