Glogster in the Classroom

http://mrschutt.glogster.com/Map-Skills/
(click this link for the full view of the glog)




How can you use Glogster in your classroom this school year to foster the development of the creating mind? Elaborate on the instructional purpose and the standards you will address.

In Howard Gardner’s book Five Minds for the Future, he suggests several guidelines in order to foster the development of the creating mind within the preadolescent child. By combining these guidelines with the use of Glogster, a free Web 2.0 tool, I can develop instructional tools and strategies to help my students understand several of the geography standards for third grade.

The three core geography standards that I will focus on are identifying geographic tools and their uses (Std. 7.1.3.A), identifying and locating places and regions (Std. 7.1.3.B), and identifying the physical characteristics of places and regions (Std. 7.2.3.A).

In order to develop the creative mind, Gardner poses that children need to “master literacies” while keeping open “…alternative possibilities and to foreground the option of unfettered exploration” (86). The instructional purpose of using Glogster is that can be tailored to my needs. In order to master the basic literacies of geography, I can use a glog just like the one I created. This glog provides a starting place for students. Rather than a linear path to learning, they can learn in the order that they choose. All the while, I can require students to think for themselves and apply their learning through writing prompts and assignment links to the Discovery Education website.

Gardner also suggests that educators enable students to focus on quality rather than quantity. More specifically, he proposes that significant time should be spent analyzing one problem in order to “develop multiple, diverse representations of the same entity” (87). The geographic standards I’ve chosen lend themselves directly to this statement. For example, I can create another glog that has links to various types of maps. After learning about topographic, political, landform and other maps, students can create an example of each of these maps for our school. Again, this is how Glogster can jumpstart the students’ creative mind.

However, Glogster does not simply have to be a starting point. It can also be process. By giving students their own Glogster account, I can have my students create their own glogs. The students might be required to find examples of these maps to post to their glogs. Or, the students might focus on just one of these types of maps and find several different examples to link to their glog. Then, the students could navigate their classmates’ glogs, learning information from each other.

These ideas lend themselves to one of Howard Gardner’s last guidelines for developing the creative mind. He advocates the need for students to make mistakes. Through the creation of their glogs, students will examine how to add videos, images, website links, and other content that will increase their basic and technological literacies. This will be a process in making mistakes and learning that there is not one specific way to solve a problem.

As I’ve used technology within the classroom, I’ve increasingly noticed a trend where students ask for help rather than attempting to solve their own problems. Web 2.0 technologies such as Glogster are prime examples of media platforms that have no straight forward answer. These tools encourage problem solving. So, through the use of Glogster I hope to continue to encourage my students to read, analyze, and think in order to expand their creativity and problem solving ability.