Glogs Due

Today, Glogs are due. About five of my 22 students have been having a very hard time saving. I spoke to a Glogster representative last week, and they assured me that the problem was fixed, however, these five students have continued to lose all of the new work that they add to their Glogs. I may have to extend the deadline for these students. I wonder why Glogster continues to affect these five Glogs only.

Week 5 Edublog Update

Today, the students are updating their Edublogs for the fifth state they are traveling through. They are researching about the landscape, and describing ways that weathering and erosion; by living organisms, wind, water or gravity, affect the land. Since we have started our chemistry unit, they have some identifying of vocabulary words. Students will be identifying elements versus compounds. They will also recognize objects as physically changing or chemically changing.

Update on Glogster: The "Support Team" emailed back, and fixed the saving problem. Students worked on those after they finished their Edublog updates for week 5. Phew, I'm glad that problem is fixed. Many of my students finished their Glogs and will be publishing them next week.

Glogster Problem

Today, we worked on our Glogs in first period. The Glogs looks great, and they have great information on them. My students have been very creative in the design of their Glogs. They seem to know much more then I do about working with this tool. Today, however, Glogster unexpectedly quit and would not save their work from this morning. This was very frustrating because it was supposed to be our last day in the computer lab working on this project, and many of the students had finished. Most of them lost quite a bit of their work this morning, when Glogster stopped working. I put an email into Glogster, so we will have to see what they say.

Week 4 Edublog Update

My science students completed their week 4 science tables last Thursday. It's interesting to see that many of them are catching on to the weekly Edublog updates. Very few students are still trying to catch up from previous weeks. I'm really enjoying this unit because they are able to communicate with one another outside of class via their email or blogs, and they can complete these assignments at home if they aren't in school. The week 5 edublog updates will be this week. I think that this is the last week that they will blog on the fifth state they are traveling through.

Day 1 in the lab for Glogster

My students are each creating glogster accounts and posters. They found the information on my santorosciencerocks website, and they also were given a hard copy. The directions and a rubric telling how their glogs should look, and what information needs to be shown. There is a youtube video they watched first, and then they began creating their glogs. They continued to refer to the video as needed while working on their glog posters. This project has gone well so far, however, there was a problem saving some of their glogs. The students were instructed to come up with 12 Earth systems vocabulary words, and define 6 of them. Then, they had to link pictures to their vocabulary. For some reason, the glogs wouldn't all save. The students had to either minimize the window, and try again, or log out and start all over again. We will see how tomorrow goes.

Glogster

I am in the process of setting up Glogster accounts for my students. We are approaching the end the Earth Systems unit, and the students will need to make a Glog web page to illustrate specific vocabulary from the unit. I have found that Glogster is a very self explanatory program, that I think will work as a very successful evaluation tool for this unit. I'm looking forward to starting this project next week.

See the USA Week 2

Last Friday, we posted our week 2 blogs for our "See the USA" project. The students moved to the second state that they are traveling through for their road trip. They were instructed to go to my website: santorosciencerocks.pbworks.com to get the information for their state. I emailed them the science table that they used to complete their week 2 blog entries. Each team has a team Gmail account, which makes communication between the teacher and teams, very easy.
I am noticing, they the students are getting more familiar with blogging, but I still have a lot of practice to do until it's smooth.