For the past 4 years, my homeroom classes have built a website about recycling and clean energy use. Every year, we’ve used a different platform to build the site. I’m always looking for a way to make it easier for the students (and myself). The first year we used iWeb, but were restricted to one computer.  For the second GM site, we used Kompozer, but this was a huge pain and didn’t allow for much creativity with page elements.  Last year we used Yola, which was awesome, but made student corrections a little tricky.  This year, we’ve added three new sites to the Green Monkey family - a blog, a wiki, and a hybrid site (under construction).

The hybrid site is a combination of Yola and Glogster EDU.  One of the limitations of Yola is that there is only one user/administrator for a site.  To get around this, I log into my Yola account on several computers and set up the individual pages for the student groups.  The students can then work on their pages.  Unfortunately, if they need to make a change to their page, I have to log them back into my Yola account.  This is a cumbersome process if you have to do it on 7 or 8 computers several days in a row.

To get around this, we used Glogster EDU.  With Glogster EDU each student gets his own account (setup by the teacher) and can construct their own “glog.”  I had the students start a glog with some specific formatting for the background and then let them go to town on their page with the content they’d researched.  Once they’d gotten started, I logged them into my Yola account and had them embed their glog onto a Yola page.  We did this all in one day and once we got the glogs embedded  I didn’t have to log students into my Yola account anymore. (See student sample - it’s pretty cool).

In the process, the students learned how to embed content onto a web page and got to dig around with the embed code to make it fit properly.  The default embed for the glog is too big (not sure how to fix this on the Glogster side), so the students had to do a little math and fiddle with the height and width to make it fit.  From there, they could go back to their glog and make any changes they needed.