This morning I received an email from a reader who was looking for an alternative to Glogster. For those not familiar with Glogster, it was a darling of the ed tech world about six or seven years ago when it empowered users to make free multimedia collages. Teachers everywhere had students making multimedia collages to summarize topics, events, and books. Glogster was free for a while then shifted to a subscription model. Here are three tools that your students can use to create multimedia collages.

Buncee:
Buncee is essentially an online slideshow. But you can save your Buncee offline as an interactive PDF which makes it a great way for students to build ebooks. A Buncee can also be used as an online invitation to an event. When you have completed the creation of your Buncee you can select “RSVP” when you share it and recipients will have an option to register their interest in attending your event.

Within Buncee there is an integrated image search which pulls images from Bing. The search is filtered for Creative Commons licensed images. Any image that a student chooses to use in his or her Buncee is automatically added to a list of citations.

Buncee has a huge catalog of stock images and animations that students can add to their slides. During the demonstration that I saw, a running dog animation was added to a slide. That animation played on a continuous loop until the slides were advanced.

Adobe Spark:

Adobe Spark is a suite of free tools for creating images, videos, and simple web pages. Adobe Spark can be used in your web browser or you can download the Adobe Spark video, image, and web page iPad apps. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to create images, web pages, and videos with Adobe Spark in your web browser.

Key features of Adobe Spark’s web app include an integrated Creative Commons image search tool, the option to download images as JPEGs, and the option to download your videos as MP4 files.

Pic-Collage:
Creating collages can be a good way for students to organize their thoughts in a visual manner. In creating their collages they are organizing images that may later become writing prompts for them. I’ve had students create collages as a way to summarize field trips. Pic Collage is the app that I like for doing that activity. Pic Collage is a free app available for Android and iOS devices. The collage you see above is a very basic use of the app on my Android phone.

After creating a collage students can add interactive elements to it by using Thinglink.
Watch the two videos that I made and embedded below to learn how to use Pic-Collage and ThingLink to create interactive collages.

Disclosure: Buncee is a client of MindRocket Media Group. I am a minority partner in MRMG.