Glogster in Year 7 French

On Friday I introduced Glogster to my Year 7 French class. They have been researching French festivals and were to present their materials using Glogster (a site that allows you to create interactive posters). Only one of the students had used Glogster before (in primary school) and the rest were enthusiastic about giving it a go.
Overall I found Glogster to be highly successful with this age group. They cottoned on to how to use it in about two minutes and set about creating some beautiful posters. It's an intuitive site and allows you to link your poster to other websites and to add audio and video of yourself and other people. The next step will be to get students to audio-record themselves speaking some of the French content onto the poster. This will allow me to examine several different macroskills at once i.e. both writing and speaking.
The students really enjoyed using Glogster and it helped with engagement which can be sometimes difficult in obligatory language classes. I find that I am more likely to achieve high quality work when it is published online. With ICT in French care must be taken that navigating sites or new programs and teaching students how to use them does not detract from time spent in the language. With Glogster, however, students were quick to become comfortable working in the program.
One disadvantage of the site is that French accents and punctuation marks don't appear on the poster. Another potential drawback is that students are less keen to work collaboratively. They each want to create their own Glog according to their own tastes and so the potential for productive group work is minimised.

Japanese and Chinese characters can be selected so it would work well for teachers working in these language domains.
I will be viewing students completed Glogs this coming week so will keep you posted on their progress!