Thursday, January 6, 2011

My love affair with Glogster

I have known about this tool for quite some time now, but just recently I did an experiential learning with it and fell deeply in love! Glogster, Glogster, Glogster! Perhaps it's that I'm finicky for a creative learning outlet, but I'm sold on using this tool for learning and evaluation. This is what I did in a nutshell:
  1. developed a workshop wiki for teaching my college's Health Sciences division about the many ways to use Glogster for learning/assessment: https://sites.google.com/site/noboringassignments/
  2. Then I started gathering examples of Glogsters.....realizing that there was a bit of a deficit in higher education examples, I got to thinking.....
  3. I needed to create a legitimate higher ed example! Being that I have formed a book club at my college to read and discuss "DIY U" by Anya Kamenetz, I thought I would use my "reading comprehension/verification" assignment as an example. I read the introduction and Chapter 1 and then proved that I read it by creating a Glogster media-rich collage that depicted the main concepts discussed in these chapters:

The long and the short of it is.....I LEARNED SO MUCH BY DOING THIS! If I had to write up notes or even a paragraph to prove that I read and understood these chapters, I would have been bored out of my mind. So, three things were learned here:
  1. I expended more time and effort doing this and therefore learned DEEPER.
  2. I actually cared enough to expend the extra effort because the outcome was something "pretty" or as my good friend and colleague, Shelley Rodrigo, says: "it was refrigerator door worthy!"
  3. I learned MORE because I had to make my summary visual -- i.e. had to metaphorically think about images to include as well as find literal images that depicted the concepts.
Glogster is an easy tool for students to learn how to use. It's easily shareable and can be used for many types of assessments! You should try it!