Symbaloo!!!!!!

When I met with Kindergarten teachers yesterday, one of the teachers said she had seen someone using Symbaloo and would like to learn more about it ...

I use Symbaloo EDU many times each day so I was glad to share!

We started by looking at one I had created with the sites that I visit often. I explained that having all these sites in one place was a time saver for me! And the fact that I could make it look pretty and colorful only made it better!

Then I showed some other symbaloos that I have made that are smaller and might be easier for teachers and/or students to handle ...

For me it is a way of organizing resources that makes them accessible ...

Since it was getting close to time for them to get students, I said I would send some instructions and videos for them to refer to.

When I got a chance to work on that this morning, I was planning on typing out a list and taking some screenshots to make a video ...

Then I decided to see what was already out there since I did not need to recreate the wheel ...

So I started searching ...

And finding things!!!

As I was discovering more and more resources, I began thinking about a way to share these resources with the teachers ...

So I decided to create a Symbaloo about using Symbaloo in Edu!

   

I have not added much yet, but will continue to add resources as I find them!

The great thing is that I won't have to send the teachers something each time I update the symbaloo since it updates automatically!

If you have or know of any great examples/resources on how to use Symbaloo in the Classroom, please send them my way!

Great news from Symbaloo ...

... at least in my opinion!

I have written a couple of blog posts about Symbaloo in the past couple of months. One of the last things I wrote about was that you could now embed a Symbaloo into a wiki or web page. I thought that was a great feature, but I wanted to be able to add a Symbaloo into a blog post. At the time of the post on embedding Symbaloo into a wiki or web page, there was no way of changing the height or width of the Symbaloo. Now there is! Yea! I am so excited about that. You will still have to use the scroll bar to see all of the Symbaloo, but they are working on fixing that.

Here is a my webmix for IWB (Interactive White Boards):

Here is a link to tutorials in School Tube on Symbaloo. There is a video tutorial for adding a webmix to your blog. I also like the Intro to Symbaloo video on Symbaloo's login page.

Organization Is Not A Nasty Word

Last week I wrote about my favorite go-to web sites in my blog post "Where Do I Go?". This week I am going to talk about how I organize my resources in order to share them.

The first thing that I do when I find a resource is save to my Diigo account. Diigo is a social bookmarking site that allows me to access my web resources wherever I go and whatever computer I am on. Steven Anderson wrote about "Why Diigo rocks" several weeks ago. After saving to my Diigo account, I then start thinking about how I want to organize my web resources. I think about who I plan to share them with, and the best way to share the resources.

Two of the places I like to go to organize my resources is Symbaloo and LiveBinders.

1. Symbaloo:  Another way to bookmark web resources and access from any internet enabled computer. This link takes you to the education site. Their bookmarks are called webmixes. You create tiles within a web mix. Each web resources becomes a tile. For instance, I have created a Digital Storytelling webmix and an IWB webmix. Symbaloo is free to use and you can add other people's webmixes to yours. Someone had created a webmix for Blooms, and I was able to add it to my list. You can also make the webmix be your homepage.
   
   How can it be used in the classroom? If you were studying Holiday's Around the World or Animals and their Habitats (or something like that), you could create a webmix that would include only those resources. Then you could embed (using an embed code from Symbaloo) the webmix onto your web page for your students to use. This would be a safe way for them to search web sites and not go out all over the web.
   
2. LiveBinders: A way to organize your resources in an online 3-ring binder. It actually looks like a notebook with tabs and sub tabs "inside" of the notebook. You can add images, videos, web pages, and pdf files (Adobe Acrobat files). You can embed the LiveBinders into your web page. LiveBinders is free and you can make them public or private. You can search LiveBinders by author, Education Category, etc. I have created LiveBinders as a place to store resources and share with the elementary school teachers in my district. I can embed one LiveBinder, or I can embed my entire shelf. Here is a sample of where I have embedded my entire shelf under Elementary Resources.
   
   How can it be used in the classroom? The exact same way that I used in the example above. Whatever you are going to be studying in your classroom, you can create a LiveBinder with all the resources you want your students to use. Then, you can embed the LiveBinder on your web page so that students can just click on it to open it up. That way, students are not traveling all over the internet, but only the web pages you researched.

I hope you enjoy these organizational resources. Why not create one?

Creative Commons Image: 'Gotta get organized' http://www.flickr.com/photos/19517696@N00/2005932

New Things With Symbaloo

I have been using Symbaloo for about a year now. I really like it a lot. It is a visual way of sharing bookmarks with other people. The "pages" you create in Symbaloo are called a "webmix"

When I first started using Symbaloo (the education version), they didn't allow you to embed your webmix anywhere. The only way I could show it on a wiki was to take a snapshot of it using a program like Jing. That was ok, but not ideal.

The other day I was creating a new webmix on Digital Storytelling and found out .... drumroll please .... they have added embed codes. I was very excited and was able to embed my Digital Storytelling webmix into the WSFCS Wiki. To embed a webmix onto a wiki, click the "Send to Friends" button and click Embed. You can then copy the embed code and paste it onto your wiki.

There is another webmix on the WSFCS Wiki that might be useful. It is the IWB webmix.  All of the orange tiles are links to Promethean information. All of the blue tiles are links to SMART information. The tiles that are pink or brown can be used on any IWB (Interactive White Board).

Have fun creating webmixes!

IWB Resources on Symbaloo



Below is a Symbaloo Webmix that I created for interactive white board resources. The orange buttons are for Promethean web links and the blue buttons are for SMART web links. Everything in pink or brown can be used on either software or board.



IWB Symbaloo Webmix



My IWB Symbaloo webmix has links to blogs and wikis from people that I follow through Twitter, Skype, or their Blogs. I added video tutorial links from Promethean and SMART's YouTube channels. There are links to lesson plans, interactives, games, and simulations that can be shown and played on the boards.

Symbaloo is a free social bookmarking tool that allows you to create a webmix (a webmix is a visual list of favorite web sites) of your favorite web sites and then share with other people. I really like Symbaloo because it is a visual image of my bookmarks. I use Diigo to save bookmarks, but with Symbaloo, I can organize by category. It helps me to better remember what I have saved in Diigo. I can share my webmixes with other people and I can add other people's webmixes to my webmix.

Some uses in the classroom would be if you were studying the Civil War, you could create a webmix of Civil War links and resources and share with your students. Of course, anything you were going to research, you could create a webmix and share with students. Other webmixes that could be created might be lesson plan resources, how to get math help, reading/literacy resources.