Glogster Project for Mandarin I

I recently had gave the students a Glogster project as a part of their end-of-unit assessment, and it worked quite wonderfully, in my opinion, though with some changes that will be implemented the next time around.  So let me share it here.

What is Glogster?

According to Glogster’s website, Glogster is…

A fun, imaginative, and powerful learning experience which fosters independent creative self expression, positive learner-teacher relationships, and teamwork on collaborative class projects.

and

A valuable teaching tool that integrates diverse core subjects including math, science, history, art, photography, music and more for individual learner portfolios, unique alternative assessments, and differentiated instructional activities.

In short it is an online, interactive, multimedia poster that is great for either formative or summative assessment.  It can easily replace the usual poster assignment that many teachers assign, and can be more fun.  The free service allows students to design a poster using images, texts, sound files, and movies (imported from YouTube).  The paid service allows students to draw directly on their poster and attach data files such as Microsoft Word, PDF, and other.

Benefits of Glogster

Easy to Take – I actually implemented the Glogster poster around the same time as a History teacher at my school implemented a traditional poster project.  The very first benefit I noticed is that I walked away from the presentation without carrying any large, heavy poster boards.  My students completed their Glogster project online, and embedded into a Wiki I set up for the class.  It was easy for me to grade by sitting in front of my computer, rather than having to carry big, heavy poster boards.  Plus, it saves the trees.

Interactive Multimedia – The fact that sound clips and videos can be incorporated opens a huge variety of how the project can be designed to meet the teacher’s objectives.  For me, I noticed that my students are weaker in the speaking and listening area, so I designed the project where they must record themselves into voice clips, and incorporate them into the Glogster.  The project forces my students to re-examine the vocabularies, phrases and grammar structures they’ve learned in the year in order to create their story.  Some of my students even went above and beyond in showing off their character recognition by typing out characters to decorate their poster.

Fun, Innovative and Easy to Use – Despite some of my students claim to be technophobe, they still enjoyed the fact that Glogster offered a lot of customization that can allowed them to design a one-of-a-kind poster for their assignment.  It is simple to use, and its learning curve is about 20 minutes, so students of different technology level can begin having fun with it quickly.  The only draw back, I would say, is that Glogster does not come with a very detailed manual for their service, but it is so simple once you learn the basics of one you can easily learn the rest.

Project Idea – Mandarin I

To share the project that I recently did with my Mandarin I class to help them with their speaking and listening with Glogster, here is what I did.

The mini-unit begins with various activities of helping students create short stories using the language they learned this year.  As students begin to become more familiar and comfortable with the language and moving out of their zone of using predicable and repetitive language into exploring and creating languages within the grammatical structure and vocabularies they possess, I begin guiding them to build longer stories.

Once students are ready, I introduced Glogster to them, and provided them a graphic organizer of story map.  Students can elect to work in pairs or by themselves, and they are required to use pictures to tell a story.  In addition, students need to record themselves telling the story, and place the clips in the Glogster so that, during the presentation, they will simply introduce themselves and let their Glogster tell the story.  As with all my projects, I give students a rubric for them ahead of time, so students have an expectation as to what I’m looking for.

Here is an example of two of my students’ Glogster story:

Try it out!  Let me know how you used Glogster in your class!

—Teresa