Many educators like Glogster since students can put in links to videos, music, and pictures instead of just text. As a free alternative, students can create a QR poster as their learning poster. Their poster can be a regular one-page word processing document.
The students type in their project title and their name. They can use their favorite font, font size and color. They can even change the background color (Format ->page -> background in Open Office).
They decide on the content for their poster. If they are doing a country report, they may have links showing a map of where the country is, its geography, and its major cities. The students can shorten the links using bit.ly and then use a QR generator such as Create QR code to put all of these links in the same QR code. They can select a small 100 x 100 or 150 x 150 so they can put numerous QR codes on the same page. They can label this QR as country info and list under it location, geography, and cities. The student can include a picture in under the Creative Commons license. They can find three news articles talking about some of the current issues in the country, shorten these links and put them in one QR code. They may label this QR as current events. They may want to list the actual events under that QR code. They can find some songs and art of the country, shorten these links and put in another QR code which they label as Arts and again indicate the exact topics in that QR code. They repeat this process for any other topics such as economy, neighbors, tourist sites both for people within the country and for visitors, or literacy.
They can word process their evaluation of how the country has changed (for the better or for the worse) in the last fifty years and what they think will happen to this country in the next fifty years.
They can email it to you, post it on a class wiki, physically post it in a country gallery in the room, and email it to parents and relatives. If you have a country gallery in your room, students groups can compare and contrast the countries within a continent and then compare and contrast countries among the continents.
Which type posters will your students use to show their learning?
Harry Grover Tuttle is a technology integration teacher and a district wide coordinator of technology at Onondaga Community College. He is also the author of several books on formative assessment.
