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Glogster and Sproutbuilder: for extreme wiki makeovers (or any other web-type makeovers)
Remember the reading resource wiki I blogged about last week?
This is what it looks like on Glogster.
As my wikis grew and grew to multiple pages, as the media I grabbed or created made each individual page longer, I began to crave a way to make my wikis prettier, to create a front page, to organize the embedded media and widgets, to create a more attractive index for my pages and links. In short, to have better control of the real estate and attractiveness of that first screen.
Linda Houle, media center director at Westmont Junior High, emailed me to share two wonderful strategies. Glogster and Sproutbuilder. Both allow you to build a kind of collage of living content that you can easily embed in any type of website.
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Sprout is the quick and easy way for anyone to build, publish, and manage widgets, mini-sites, mashups, banners and more. Any size, any number of pages. Include video, audio, images and newsfeeds and choose from dozens of pre-built components and web services. (I am just beginning to play with this one!)
Glogster allows you to upload images, audio, video. It allows you to add text, graphics, banners, and frames from a variety of galleries and to play with colors and fonts. And it allows you to use space freely, to move everything around, to rotate, to place with wild abandon!
The wonderful model Linda shared was Dr. Donna Baumbach’s and Dr. Judy Lee’s WebTools4U2Use. (Both are professors at the University of Central Florida.) Not only is the wiki a brilliant example of Glogster use, it is a brilliant example of a 2.0 professional development tool. You absolutely must explore it! And take a good long look at the valuable integration ideas for each tool.
I am wondering how tools like these might help us create far more attractive, better organized virtual libraries.
Note: I share images of the pages I made. I wish this blogging software would allow me to embed the glogs alive as I might in other 2.0 tools.
Another note: As usual, I got a little out of control in terms of design. Don’t do this at home. Please try to demonstrate a better filter for taste.
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About Joyce Valenza
Joyce is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at Rutgers University School of Information and Communication, a technology writer, speaker, blogger and learner. Follow her on Twitter: @joycevalenza
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