Do You Glog?

Haven't blogged much the last few weeks as I've been completely obsessed with the elections. Did anyone else cry like a baby Tuesday night? (A good thing!)

I'm attending Kathy Schrock's workshop at the CASL conference today. (Hi, Kathy, if this shows up in your reader!) I've grown a bit leery of "tech" workshops, as the last few I've been to I haven't really learned all that much. Kathy showed some nifty Web 2.0 tools that I hadn't seen before, though (and I was able to share Thinkature with her, so that was cool!)

I'll share some other, but right now I'm having fun playing with Glogster--an online, interactive poster masker, that would be a fun classroom tool. Before I go too much further, I'll add one caveat that it's not fully functional with a Mac, which is a HUGE drawback, as far as I'm concerned. That's completely ridiculous in this day and age, when we're supposedly aiming for platform neutrality.

Nevertheless, the app is fun--lets you upload photos, video and audio, add text and graphics, apply a background.

Here's the completely lame Glog I made. I tried syncing with the Mac to add a video greeting. no go. I assume it works with the Windows platform. It also allows you to grab youtube video.

This might be a fun way for students to do a class presentation, and certainly more interesting than the deadly Power Point presentation. For example, I included audio of Robert Frost reading his poem, Birches. And a couple of primary source letters, along with his image. As I said, pretty lame. But you get the idea of what you can do with the tool.

To Penzu or Not to Penzu--That Is the Question

I just spent some spent awhile looking at Penzu, an online journal-writing tool Kathy showed us. It has the questionable advantage of being completely private, unless the writer chooses to share, unlike many online tools which are public by default, with the option of being private.

Penzu is low on bells and whistles--not always a bad thing!--and is just what it says--a place to journal online, with the option to add images. No comments, no online communities. It's the virtual equivalent of paper and pencil.



So here's my question: What's the point? I'm no fan of technology for technology's sake, so while Penzu saves some trees, but if you're not worried about that, why not just use a journal, especially since there's no RSS feed, so you'd have to go to each student's site individually.

My larger concern relates back to the Will Richardson workshop I attended earlier, and our necessity to move beyond merely publishing, to engage students in an ongoing dialogue to develop and extend their ideas, making connections both literally and intellectually.

Penzu obviously hinders that process. And while there is a place for "mere" journaling, I wonder if this might not be a better tool for personal, rather than educational use?

Having said that, Kathy said teachers are thrilled by it because they don't have to worry about online privacy issues. Maybe I'm just thinking like a high school teacher, and for younger students this is a good introduction to establishing some sort of online presence?