Okay, I think I have become a little wacko. It is 5 a.m. and I am blogging about glogging. I have been wanting to have my students do a project using Glogster.com. After introducing to Tech221 and asking them to try it out I made a couple of glogs myself. I am addicted. I have spent all night dreaming up projects that my 7th and 8th graders can do.
I have also decided on a new classroom mantra. Fun, Fun, and more Fun. After listening to the teachers at my school that went to ISTC last weekend and their discussion of one of the sessions on the ‘reasons to have fun’ in the classroom, I realize that I am a closet ‘fun teacher’. I do think that if students can equate fun and excitement with learning than we will have life long learners on our hands. So when the statement was made in the lunch room that mass murderers come from households that did not have any fun time it home that even though none of my students will ever be mass murderers I need to make sure that we have fun in the classroom just because. Therefore, even though I normally daily try to inject a sense of fun everyday with my general demeanor in the classroom I am going to find activities that allow students to have more fun. Some of the ways that I do this already is to use smart board games for review, to make sure that in my chemistry unit we burn stuff up, and now I am going to include making glogs. Glogster glogs are my new fun addiction. I am old (over 50) and if I can have fun and be inspired by such a simple concept what will my students think. I know. They will LOVE it.
The first thing that we are going to do is to film ourselves doing chemical reaction experiments and then put them in a glog. I can’t wait to share them with all of you. I encourage everybody to become a glogger.
4 comments:
I always tell students we never have parties, because school is fun all the time. They rarely buy that. But the truth is, learning should be stimulating, because there is a connection between emotion and learning.
I agree... the best teachers I had made learning fun. If learning is felt as forced then they will hate school and probably will struggle.
Glogging is fun! When I first learned about Glogster, I think I made somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 glogs in the first few weeks. My students were creating them for everything. Fun is an important part of the education and learning equation. Enjoy!
I love glogging! I was preparing a wiki workshop to do for teachers and I realized that all the wikis I was using as examples used glogs for the frontpages.
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