The Noose and Glogster

The second story in the anthology is "The Noose." Set in 1955, it tells the story of a Colored family preparing to move because of government redistricting. When the father is reclassified as a African, the ten-year old boy's eyes are opened to the realities of apartheid.

From the opening line, "The year I turned ten, apartheid gripped me fully by the throat for the first time," to the last, "And for the first time I felt I knew what Uncle Richard meant by the 'noose around all our necks'," the story is rich in imagery and metaphor. I decided to explore this as a middle school student might by creating an online poster with Glogster. I searched and selected images brought to mind by the text, and added quotes from the story as way of explanation.



You can also view my poster within the Glogster site itself.

I kept my poster fairly simple and literal, but students could be infinitely more creative. A teacher might challenge advanced students to not use images taken from the text (for example, the noose). Students might also add their own explanations instead of quotes from the story. They might use a single image and then add more text. Glogster also allows for the use of video as well as images.

Creating a glog is much simpler than a comic strip, although it too has a learning curve. It does raise the issue of copyright and fair use images as students will most likely want to pull images from all over the web. Teachers should provide guidance in terms of using images appropriately, both for this assignment and as a life-long skill.

Like the comic strip, Glogster allows students to comment and review each other's work. The ability to embed glogs into a blog or web page would allow teachers to share work with parents and guardians.