Changes At Glogster… Great Info and Links For All Levels Of Users

First there were Blogs, then even Phlogs, and of course there are Glogs. While many educators are aware of Glogster, they may not know of the changes that have come and are coming to this awesome tool.  The basic edition is still free, although there is even a change coming to the free edition. As always,  feel free to subscribe to this Blog by RSS or email, follow me on twitter at (@mjgormans), and also discover some great resources at my 21centuryedtech Wiki!  You will also find my postings at Tech and Learning Magazine. Now lets take a moment to check out some good gab from Glogster! – Have a great week – Mike

OK, I Am New – What is Glogster? (Or, Just Skip Down To Next Bold Heading  Because  You And Your Students Are Already Glogging)

What do you get when you mix up the whole genre of  multimedia, smack it into a blog, and then artistically arrange it into an awesome interactive on-line poster. The results as all of you may know is a Glog, made popular by the people at Glogster!  The benefits of using Glogster in the education include the opportunity for students to use a dynamic, multi-sensory learning program that fulfills Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles, enables standards mastery, provides differentiated instruction and so much more. Are you a newbie to Glogster, or just want to get your class started?  Then be sure to visit Glogster EDU, because that is where the free sign up resides for educators. What are the educational benefits of Glogster?  First, students can become engaged in any curriculum by  creating a Glog (interactive poster). Let your lesson plans run wild! It could be a book review, a science fair project,  a biography of a famous person, a timeline, or an interactive report on anything! Perhaps you wish to work on the 21st Century Skill involving collaboration. Then start a class project Glog involving a project based learning activity or a unit of study!  Glogster allows for school-level teacher management of students and classes claiming a private and safe student environment.  Glogster really does allow for engagement of students in fun and creative activities which can be aligned to national educational standards along with those ever-important ISTE NET-S Standards. Take a moment and make your own test Glog and then more importantly, sign up!

The First Big Change … 50 Reasons To Sign Up Now For A Free Educational Glogster Account!

The free Educational Glogster Account allows teachers to create accounts for 100 student users! Beginning in November 2010 Glogster is lowering the number of student accounts to 50 per teacher. Sign up now and you have 50 more student accounts then in November. That really is 50 reasons to get a Glogster Edu Free account Now!

Most Gloster Changes Are In The Premium Account… And They Look Not Only Good… But Great!

OK, not everything is free… although the free version of Glogster really is pretty amazing! If your school or classroom wants to step its Glogging experience up a notch then you may want to investigate Glogster Premium For Education.  In addition to the Free Version’s 100 student accounts, student account management, comment management, profiles management, and a public for all feature; Glogster Premium For Education includes a host of extra features. Some of these include direct teacher access to student work and nicknames  along with classroom, project, and assessment management resources. There are also tools for presentations, portfolios, and class messaging.

The Other Changes!

On September 15, 2010  edu.glogster.com launched a new product interface and partnerships that will now allow teachers to share students and projects with each other at the school level. As part of this new solution, teachers and students can now be interconnected in a school-based educational network enabling them to work on collaborative cross-curricular projects within dynamic teacher accounts. Teachers can even share students with other teachers, create class projects, construct engaging homework assignments, and encourage the building of student portfolios.  Glog presentations can be produced by teachers and students and better yet,  teachers can invite students to participate in projects at the school-level as well as expanded classroom activities. Glogster claims these changes allow for a real school virtual environment, but in a safe, online setting. Martin Santorcl, Co-Founder & Product Director at Glogster states, “Our new Portfolio & Presentation features allow educators to file and sort many Glogs in one Digital Glog Book. This is the next step for digital literacy because now schools can easily create curriculum utilizing appropriate interactive multimedia books and then archive them for future teaching.”

Still More Changes… Glogster Has Also Enlisted New Partners

Are your students  creating wikis? In its latest integrative application, Wikispaces users can now add a Glog to their wikis with one click from any Glogster EDU account. Now teachers, students, librarians, and other educators can make their Wikis even more powerful, and do it with ease. Are you an Edmodo user?  Glogster EDUcators can now move their Glogs into their Edmodo live feed clicking the  button under each Glog (“Edmodo this Glog”). This allows educators to easily showcase their multimedia content.

Ten Glogster Links To Check Out

Glogster Education Resource Library – The Glogster EDU Educator Resource Library is a 29 page PDF document of outstanding examples of Glogsterlesson plans and rubrics, standards alignment activities, and Glog building media resources. It has been built by and for the Glogster community of educators.

Glogopedia – The very best of educational Glogs. A great place to get inspired  and create Glogs to be used in the classroom and activities for students.

Glog Categories – Check out thousands of Glogs by subject. A lot of wonderful ideas reside in these teacher and student works.

Certified EDU Glog Ambassador – Are you already working hard teaching students to Glog and providing Glog expertise to other professionals? Take a look at this program with a lot of perks, including a free premium upgrade!

The G Lab – Great place to share your Glog Experience while learning from others.

Glogster Tutorial – A great five minute tutorial for educators on how to set up an educator account and use Glogster by Traci Blazosky

Discovery Education On Glogster – Great short tutorial presented by Discovery’s Steve Dembo and company.

Adding Video and Audio To Glogster – Short tutorial video on using open source Camstudio to import video and audio into Glogster.

ABC News – An excellent news story on Glogster

Make A Virtual Science Fair – A fantastic way to use Glogster to create a Digital Science Fair project using Glogster.

Hope I was able to provide some new Glogster information for those just starting and those pro gloggers!  While I am a free user, I will saving my pennies to invest in that Premium Account.  Be on the look out for my Advanced Google Search and my Evaluating a Web Page Series. You can also find a variety of my postings under Blogs at Tech & Learning Magazine. Take a moment to leave a comment and also subscribe to this blog by RSS or email, share with others, and as always follow me on twitter (@mjgormans). See you soon and happy Glogging! – Mike

The Googal In Google… Google Can Do That? Part One

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Picture Credit : http://www.flickr.com/photos/carlosluna/ / CC BY 2.0

What a great week to explore the multiple faces of  Google! I welcome you to investigate and share this post with others. While this first post isn’t quite a googal, it should be enough information to keep everyone satisfied until the next post comes along. Please take a moment to follow me on twitter (@mjgormans), I will follow back and we can learn a googal from each other! Also, please pass this post on to others and  take a moment to subscribe to this blog by RSS or email!  Now take a moment to explore a Googal in Google! – Mike

It was many years ago that I was introduced to the internet search engine. It amazed me that a website could search through the entire web and pull up web pages from my keywords. While I got my start with Altavista, I soon found myself excited by both the simplicity and complexity provided by Google. Wikipedia defines Googal as “the large number 10100, that is, the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeros in decimal representation. The term was coined in 1938 by Milton Sirotta (1929–1980), nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, when he was nine years old”. The people at Google understood the meaning Googal would bring. In fact new words have appeared in the English language such as googled, googling, googler, and possibly even googlist.

In this Blog Posting I would like to investigate a small portion of the new  Googal that is found in Google. Most people are aware of Google Docs, Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Flickr,Google You Tube and the Google Search Engine. It is amazing to explore some of the lesser known areas, beta projects, experiments in the making, and those too new for the (googal) of people to have found yet. Let’s explore!

Google Options – Wonder Wheel and Timeline

First, let’s look at the Google Search Engine itself. Have you ever clicked on that Show Options Button?  If you have not done it lately, now is the time.  Click on the Show Options Buttonunder the search and you will see a bunch of options. One of the neatest options introduced in May of 2009  is the Wonder Wheel. When it is clicked, users get a graphical display of their search. A great way for students to expand search terms!  Directly to the right on the results page  are websites related to the wheel. Click on a spoke of the wheel and you get a new wheel and new links related to that spoke.

While in the options menu check out the  Timeline Option. This can can be a neat educational tool. Type in iPod and you will get a timeline of significant events in the iPod’s history. Feel free to explore the option window and also notice you can  Hide Options at anytime.

Google Squared

Another new tool released in the Spring of 2009 is Google Squared (just type inwww.google.com/squared in your browser). Google describes this tool as a way to collect multiple  facts on a subject from the web. Google Squared then  presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet. You can even customize and export results to Excel. Best of all, for students,  it  even includes pictures. Read more about it at  Google’s Blog.

Google News Timeline

Are your students following a news event? How about looking at an event in history? Then a new service from Google called Google News Timeline is a great resource. Google describes this service as  a web application that easily organizes search results by date. Google puts the news events in a  graphical timeline filled with links and pictures.  Data sources include recent and historical news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts, sports scores, and even information relating to current  media, such as music, albums, and movies. Check out the capabilities as described in the Google Information Site.  Take a moment to view the example below that displays  how students can even find primary sources in news history using Google News Timeline.

Google Images – More Options with Similar Images and Creative Commons

While students have access to images under “fair use guidelines ” there are still limits to usage. This is especially true  if projects are to be shared online.  Also, educators may have the need to share an image on the web via school web page, blog, or wiki. This is where the ability to use pictures created under “creative commons” comes in handy. Check out this Google July 2009 Blog that explains new features in the advanced settings for image filters. It is a great way to use images others have created, and still stay within copyright. Google has also introduced Similar Images  Search. First, search for a picture , next use Similar Images  Search to find more pictures  that compliment the original search. Also be  sure to note that there is a safe search option in Google.  It  should be set on the strict filtering option when using Google Images and even for a regular Google Web Search in the classroom.

Google Listen

Want to get more use out of your portable devices ? In August of 2009 Google released Google Listen. Google describes it as ” getting more power from your Android-powered device”.  Google Listen allows you to search, subscribe, download and stream. The user can determine what to listen to by  subscribing to programs and  using search words.  Google Listen will take this user information and create a personalized audio-magazine.  At this time, Google Listen is indexing thousands of popular English-only audio sources. Check out the fact sheet and try a download.

Google Sets

Although Google Sets has been around a few years it is a little known product that can be fun to use. Google Sets was  one of the very first applications produced by Google Labs. This awesome little search tool allows the user  to automatically create sets of items from just a few examples. These  user made sets identify  related items on the web.  Predict relationships between words and construct either large  sets or small sets. It is a great tool for brainstorming, seeing relationships, or just figuring out what is missing. It is a surprisingly  intuitive interface, one that will have you attempting to see if it knows what you are thinking. On a recent exploration I entered lions, panthers, bears and was given a set of mammals. However, when I entered Detroit Lions, Chicago Bears,  Carolina Panthers  I was shown a set of NFL Teams. It even knows the Seven Dwarfs from motion picture,  Snow White!

While I did not supply a googal of information, I do hope you are now more familiar with  a little bit more of the googal of resources found in Google. As you explore the website I am sure you will continue to find even more ways to connect Google with today’s digital learner. Please reply to add ideas!  I am excited to share in upcoming posts a google of information on Google, or is it googal? Please visit me on my wiki as I continue to  promote the use of free and inexpensive resources at http://21centuryedtech.wikispaces.com/, and enjoy googling! – Mike

Lexipedia : A Cool 21st Century Tool… But What’s A Fuzzynym??

Have you ever found a new tool that was really neat, even though you didn’t understand it completely. I came across such a tool in the beta phase called Lexipedia. I think it is one that will especially be appealing to those teachers of Language Arts. Now for the part I did not understand, or better yet, I will include it in the post below.  Read on …  – Mike

There is no doubt that Lexipedia is a very cool tool! In fact it describes itself as a site “where words have meaning”. Upon inspection, I found that most words entered return a multiple list of definitions. Teachers attempting to convey parts of speech to their students are in for a real treat. Foreign language teachers (English, French, Dutch, Spanish, German, Italian) will be amazed to find a tool that can be used in their classrooms. Lexipedia does an amazing job of taking  each word entered and returning not just definitions.  It categorizes the words by parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective, and adverb). It then takes the parts of speech and tries to find relationships including  synonyms, antonyms and fuzzynyms. Hold on… “fuzzynyms”!

Yes, as I was typing the word fuzzynym in my post,  WordPress underlined “fuzzynym” with a big red line as if I had spelled it wrong!  There was no way I could spell a word wrong in my post!  My first thought was, “I am not an English major… so maybe I should look up “fuzzynym”!  I went to Merriam-Webster.com and asked for a definition …  momentarily it returned, “The word you’ve entered isn’t in the dictionary”. I then visited Wikipedia where someone must have an idea. I was amazed as Wikipedia returned “no result”. As I googled the word “fuzzynym” I was amazed to find 9,910 results. I could not find a site that gave a clear definition, but did find quite a few references to Lexipedia. Then it finally occurred to me; why not type the word “fuzzynym”  into Lexipedia? I entered the Lexipedia site with excitement and a sense of relief. I hit the letters on my keyboard f-u-z-z-y-n-y-m… I waited… The response appeared… NOTHING!

OK, I could not figure out a real definition for “fuzzynym”.  It does appears that it may be a word that is related, but does not fit the category of antonym or synonym. Regardless, Lexipedia is an fantastic site with great educational potential. It will  definitely help students with definitions and the understanding of parts of speech. It is an awesome tool that will facilitate young writers attempting to make their essays more interesting with a great data base of antonyms and synonyms.  I can even envision effective ways for teachers to incorporate Lexipedia into their lessons. It is time for you to take a moment to look at this powerful tool. Also, please leave a comment if you can help me better define  “fuzzynym”.

Thanks for stopping by and as always please follow me on Twitter (mjgormans), I will follow back and we will learn from each other. Also feel free to visit my 21centuryedtech Wiki filled with some amazing free resources for 21st century learning!  Have a wonderful week – Mike