Symbaloo

Symbaloo is a webpage that allows you to gather many website links into one grid, turning them not into blue text links like this but little picture icons. Symbaloo lets you have many pages of these gathered links in a tabbing system which makes it great for people who want kids to use links in sets based on units, seasons, or times of year. For instance, last year I used symbaloo for staff development, 2nd grade insect work, and the Olympics. The link above takes you to my Olympic symbaloo, and you can see it also allows you to group the links in color zones if you need to further separate them on a page (mine are blue, red, green, and grey: look behind the little pictures to the background color of the square). It's very easy to just drag the icons around and rearrange them, but once you've gathered them where you want, then you drag over them to group them into a color set.

Symbaloo is something that could be duplicated on a doc. For instance, you could open up a Google doc, add a picture, and set a hyperlink to that picture. You could do that over and over, resizing the pictures to a uniform look. Then you would share the doc with the students via a gmail group. It is also something that could be duplicated on a webpage like weebly or a google site. This capability isn't unique. It's just one answer to the age old question : how to get kids to tech options in a consistent way. It's a poor man's webpage that simply says "here are some tabs full of resources I offer as choices." I've also seen it offered in a more unique way with older students who are comfortable moving between chrome tabs: you can set the icons as numbers, allowing kids to move through multiple webpages in order, building on knowledge in a sequence you select.

One final way symbaloo is powerful is that it can be searched based on the Gallery. So if you want to know what other 2nd grade teachers teaching insects have used as webpages... searching Symbaloo gives you the curation that Google lacks.

Symbaloo calls each tab of gathered resources a webmix. In my experience, a teacher should create a webmix for those times you want kids to go to many options on repeated occasions. For instance, I might make a webmix for the big research unit on colonial history I have to teach every year, or I might make a webmix of math game pages since I want the class to have tech time focused on math every Wednesday. Making a webmix of 3 apple websites for one lesson in which the teacher will be showing the webpages isn't a good use of Symbaloo.

To start this workshop and make it somewhat useful, please reflect on something in your teaching that fits the examples I gave. When you offer students independent time (or homework) on the computers... when you have many options (at least 5) of places you want them to explore... when you want them to have this independence with many options over a long period where offering this product isn't a one-off... what is that to you? A page of spelling games? A page of fake news links? A page of biology departments at leading universities? Perhaps you already have these links posted to a webpage, doc, or playlist--that's fine. You can use a pre-selected set and see if you like the way they present in Symbaloo better.

How to Use Symbaloo