I’ve been messing around with the EDU feature of glogster.com, as well as messaging back and forth with a very helpful contact at Glogster, and I have come up with the following outline for teachers to use when setting up a classroom of students to create their own Glogs.

For those of you that are just tuning in, Glogster is a fairly new website that allows students to create a poster-like webpage. The features allow students to embed all sorts of content from websites, webcams, images, audio, and the list goes on.  The resulting product being a very content-rich page of information. The difference between the regular glogs and the EDU glogs seems to be that they are private, and only members of your class can see them.

Setting up your class is actually very, very simple. As a matter of fact, students don’t even need to register or provide an email address. Registering the Glogs, usernames, and passwords is all taken care of in a very short setup when the teacher registers for an account. Here are the steps.

Step 1:

Visit www.glogster.com/edu and click on register link at the top.

Step 2

Clicking on the Register Link will provide you a registration page where you will need to enter the following information:

Glog Name – This will serve as the base url for all of the student glogs. For example one student would be s001.teachertechglog.glogster.com if teachertechglog were the Glogs name. So keep in mind that you will want to pick a name that will reflect the class.

Password - This is your password, not the students.

# of Students – This is where you select how many student glogs you want them to generate. This will generate that many glogs, and they will have generic names like s001.glogname.glogster.com

Email Adress – Give them your email address so that they can send you all of the passwords that they create for the student glogs(students can change them later).

Step 3

Once you have completete registration, you will receive a confirmation email along with the passwords for all of the glogs. You will need to assign the glogs to the students and give them their usernames and passwords. Like I said before, this is nice because you don’t have to worry about having the students register themselves.

A Few Things to Note

#1 – Each of the Glogs and the student profiles are private. So unless you are logged in and are a part of the class, you cannot view their profiles or glogs.

#2 - With that being said, all of the student glogs will become friends with one another, so they can check each other’s glogs by visiting their links from their profile.

#3 – Students can apparently change their passwords. This might be a warning, and something that may need to be changed on Glogster’s end.  I would like to see a way for teachers to control that, and/or be able to delete student Glogs.

#4 – Students can message each other through the built in messaging feature. As of yet I do not see a way to monitor it. Maybe they will change this in the future.