Guest post by Glogster EDU Ambassador Rositsa Mineva, a primary English Language Teacher from Stara Zagora, Bulgaria.

In Bulgaria, students start learning English at the age of 8, starting with basic speaking, reading, comprehensive listening, and writing.

When students are this age, they aren’t required to actually write vocabulary. Instead, students memorize words through repetition of new vocabulary, sentences, texts etc. Students need audio and visual aids as much as possible to help them with the learning process.

For a long time, I’ve been brainstorming some ideas on how to facilitate the self training of my students so they can continue to learn, both in and out of the classroom. I discovered that the best way to do this is by supplying them with more audio and visual aids to use at home and in the classroom. From this observation, the idea for a virtual classroom and interactive textbook was born.

Glogster EDU has helped a lot with both. On Glogster EDU, I made my virtual classroom with students. Using the variety of tools on the site,  I could make my textbooks interactive and share them with my students and colleagues (example 1), (example 2).

Making my textbook interactive was quite simple: I needed only to scan the pages of my real textbook as pictures (png, jpeg files), find audio files of my English lessons as mp3 files, find some interesting links in a connection with the topic and main aims of the lesson I was making interactive, and put them together on one page.

See the Glog below for an example.

It’s a fast, easy and fun activity which takes no more than 15 minutes to create. I compiled all units on a contest page.

I also put the link to my interactive textbook on the class wiki and connected it to my Skype information and the school website.

My students can no use their interactive textbook freely at home and listen to lessons and do exercises online. This improves my students’ reading and listening skills and makes learning more fun and engaging. It helps not only  students but parents as well.

Learn more about my internet classroom here.