I have found a program that is going to make classroom transitions to paperless, seamless!  It's called Glogster EDU and it allows you to create custom and interactive online posters that include pictures, videos, text, audio, graphics, and links. 
These Glogster posters would be perfect for student presentations, research reports, and even note-taking and study sheets!  You can add all kinds of backgrounds, picture frames, and decorations to your posters too.  Yes, the days of (boring) text only assignments are over... or, at least, reduced!  

I was playing around on it today and I made a sample poster to show you what I mean - it's an example of a report that you could have students do on their favourite musician (mine is Tom Petty.)   My only complaint is that I couldn't really embed my poster onto this blog.  It seems as if you need a full (blank) page to embed it onto, otherwise you have to scroll down and over to see the rest of the poster.  I tried resizing the dimensions of the poster in the html code but it would crop off some of the poster instead of resizing it.  If anyone who has used Glogster EDU knows how to properly resize posters, please let me know!  

If you want to see some classroom Glog projects that are successfully embedded then Mrs. Grayson's Class Blog has some really cool ones on their home page (actually, now that I think about it - why don't I just contact them to see how they did it?!)  

All in all, though, programs like Glogster make me really excited to start teaching!  I can't wait to see what my students will come up with using something like this.  
5/19/2012 03:22:50 pm

Nice that you found this from another teacher and linked to her.

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5/20/2012 03:52:28 am

Did you insert your poster as a picture? If so, when you hover over the bottom right corner, a little red square appears and when you click on it, you can resize the image. Try that and see if it works!

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5/20/2012 10:24:03 am

I kind of thought of that but if I inserted it as a picture, then the links I have on there probably wouldn't work. I'm going to keep playing around with it though. Thanks very much for the suggestion!

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5/21/2012 08:23:10 am

I figured it out! In the first part of HTML code, it reads scale=100. Play around with that number to change the size of the image that posts to your blog! That way all your links will still work and viewers will be able to see your whole poster.

5/20/2012 11:39:44 am

I ran into glogging a few weeks ago on #comments4kids and haven't had a chance to do much with it so I'm glad to hear you found it useful and I'm finding this discussion useful to help me learn more.

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5/21/2012 12:02:56 pm

Miss W you are a life saver! Thanks so much for helping me with embedding my glog... and for giving me a topic to blog about today! One thing I had to do was adjust the height number in the HTML code so that there wasn't a bunch of empty space underneath my poster but your "scale" idea worked like a charm!

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5/24/2012 03:46:08 am

I just came across another blogger who was talking about Glogster. She said she creates them for students as a part of her computer centers. Here is the link of a Glog she created for a student review on Egypt: www.hraki.edu.glogster.com/egypt Just another cool idea for incorporating technology in the classroom!

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5/24/2012 03:48:15 am

Sorry, my link didn't work in the last one: http://hraki.edu.glogster.com/egypt/

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