BP2 Glogster Review

Vivianne

BP2 Glogster Review

My students may not necessarily have any experience in the world of Graphic arts when they enroll into the GDA program. They may have seen a cool CG movie or they may be into comic books and come in thinking they are already a designer. They fail to realize the steps one must take to be a successful designer and don’t understand the concept of one must crawl, walk and then run in order to achieve a learned behavior.

In the 1^st course of the program, Basic Design, students receive a brief lesson on the history of graphic design. They receive an assignment where they have to write a paper on a specific era within the timeline and as you can imagine they are not so excited about that.

So in my journey of looking for web 2.0 tools to add to my digital palette I came across Glogster.com, which will allow me to bring excitement to this history lesson and give the students the opportunity to collaborate and work together. 

What is Glogster? Wikipedia defines Glogster as a “social network that allows users to create free interactive posters, or glogs. It looks like a poster, but readers can interact with the content.” You may be asking yourself, what is a glog, I know I did. 

• Glog, short for graphical blog, is an interactive multimedia image.

What does Glogster do? Glogster provides an environment to design interactive posters. A student has the capability to insert text, images, photos, sound, videos, special effects and other elements into their glogs to create a multimedia online creation.

Dashboard Window

Getting Started. Setting up an FREE account was fairly simple. You have the option to sign in with your Facebook account or create a new account, if preferred. I used my Facebook account; this option will be best for my students being that my students are constantly forgetting their username and passwords. If we can limit the creation of usernames and passwords than it will make our lives less frustrating. After creating my account, I entered my dashboard, which is where my profile, 'glogs' library, and interaction with others are located.

The Creation. This is where you are able to begin to create your Glog (the interactive poster). To create a new Glog, I had to choose the orientation of the layout. You only have 2 options, portrait or landscape. In your edit screen, you click on the “ADD CONTENT” button. When you click it, you open the menu bar, which displays specific design elements to start with the building of your interactive poster. 

TEXT: Adding type to your Glog is simple. You click on “Use It” in the Text Window and your text pops up on your poster. You can control the size, font, color and alignment to your liking. The font option is limited but for beginner students, like the students in DD150, is sufficient.

Inserting Images

GRAPHICS: This section introduces the clip art gallery that Glogster offers. This allows the students to have some fun with image and layout. You can resize, rotate, and duplicate images. The option I like the most in this section is that you add hyperlinks to the clipart.

IMAGE: The most important aspect to your interactive poster is your images. In this section you can upload images to your layout. You can search or retrieve for images from your Facebook, Flickr, and Picassa accounts. It will ask you to sign into your account if you are to choose from those specific accounts. The best part of this section is a Google search built in for images so students do not have to leave the site to search for images.

WALL: In this section you can modify the background of your Glog. You have the option of choosing solid colors for your background or from the gallery.

Poster in preview mode

AUDIO: In this section you can upload sound into your Glog. You have the option to record yourself or upload audio.

VIDEO: You can add movies into your Glog as well. You have the option to either add movie files from your computer, YouTube, or Vimeo account. You can also customize the video player to coordinate with the style of your design.

Building a Community. Once your design is finished, it can be saved and shared for the world to see. It can be shared through a link or directly to social networks such as Facebook & Twitter. Glogs can also be exported and saved to computer-compatible formats. 

You can also share Glogster through the community section where you can add friends and comment on each others work. This feature is great because students can look at each others work and learn how to give and handle constructive feedback early in the program. In addition to sharing with the world, the interactive poster can be edited with a group of individuals. This is a great tool to have students work collectively on 1 themed projects. 

Cost/Efficiency. The best thing about this tool is that it’s FREE. They offer an educational version, Glogster EDU. It is described as a collaborative online learning platform for teachers and students to express their creativity, knowledge, ideas and skills in the classroom. Besides creating interactive posters, it also features collaborative class projects, teacher management, and private student environments. The educational version is not free. You must purchase a license, which includes different packages.

Outcome. Creating a lesson plan to teach history is always a challenge because the snooze button comes to mind. With Glogster I can take the presentation to the next level. This tool would work for my beginner students in introducing the history aspect of the graphic design field.

I tested the product by designing a poster to embrace the era of the 1980’s. I researched images from their textbook, which I was able to search from the Google search option. I included a movie that I found in YouTube that details the history of graphic design.
I believe this will chance the face of the timeline paper assignment. My students will have fun learning the history of Graphic Design with Glogster. 

Here is link to the the Time Line of the 1980's era poster I created with Glogster.com