Week 5, Reflection 4

Glogging Away!!

Hey there guys! So, who had fun doing this week's activities? I certainly did! Although I found Glogster was a little bit hard to use at first... I just couldn't figure it out! Thankfully, I'm a little bit technologically savvy and I like playing with these things, so I finally got the basics down-pat! Here is the link for you to have a little look at what I played with this week!

ICTs for Drama and Music Glog

As I said, I actually found Glogster a little hard to use at first, and once my free trial runs out... Holy Expensive!!! I hope I'm not the only one thinking this, maybe it's just me as a student teacher still trying to struggle to pay my way through uni, but I looked at those prices and almost fell over - and if I wasn't sitting down, I may well have done just that! After I got used to the program though, I quite like it! It's a lot more fun to create funky looking pages, and it's all there for you in the one place. 

The above statement refers to the ridiculously old, outdated - but still sometimes useful, I guess - Microsoft Powerpoint! I've been creating slideshows on Powerpoint since I was in primary school (all those many moons ago!) and to be quite honest with you, there's not much that's new and exciting about it. While powerpoint is great for lectures at university, where people are there for themselves to learn specific coursework - if you are trying to stimulate an overactive, easily distracted mind, you're definitely going the wrong way about it. It's nothing they haven't seen before, too many times, and to be quite frank with you, it will be plain old boring for a teenager who has an almost limitless range of technology and exciting new games and software available to them. Sorry Microsoft... Time to come up with something new. You're putting us to sleep.

 

Prezi is quite a fun software to play with also, and while it wasn't new to me, it still gave me more to play with than Powerpoint did. I very much prefer Glogster as a fun and interactive tool for students to create their own Glog each, whether for assessment or homework purposes. It is handy that you can upload the Digital Video that you've worked on previously for assessment - or from the year before and on the same page, post another video to compare to the previous one, write a little bit of feedback, post some cool pictures, make it look interesting and exciting, and still have EVERYTHING right there on the ONE PAGE ! There's no "next slide", "previous slide", "Back 5 slides", "whoops, that's in the wrong order", "where did that sound effect come from!?". It's all there, right where you can see it, in a fun and different sort of format.

I personally think that Glogster would be a fun way for Junior drama classes to make a subject like Shakespeare a little bit more enjoyable. By taking a classic Shakespearean piece and adding it to a Glog, then including some "real world" translations that have helped them understand what they are reading, what the students themselves thought it meant originally?, maybe a short video clip of them, a YouTube preview from the Blockbuster movie we all know exists, or a voice recording of the student. It takes something that a teenager might originally find quite dull (even though we drama teachers know very well, it is not!), and puts a modern twist on it that will HOPEFULLY make it more enjoyable for them!

My only tip... Make sure you know what you're doing with the program before you try and get your students to work it. It will be much more beneficial to them if you can give them a step-by-step example of how to add photos, videos, text etc! It will also make it a much faster process!

Until next week!! Get away from that Powerpoint presentation, and go have some real fun!!