Thursday, March 26, 2015

Teaching & Learning with Symbaloo

Symbaloo is a free, easy-to-use tool to organize and push out online content to students.  Symbaloo has been around since 2009, and provides an EDU version for educators.  Symbaloo gives educators the ability to curate the Internet via visual web links to enhance their classroom instruction or serve as a digital bulletin board for online teaching resources.

After creating an account, the first step is to create a webmix that allows the user to compile anything that has a web address into a visual link.  The creator of a webmix controls the links and can organize them in a visual grid of squares that are visually appealing and more intuitive to navigate since they can be titled, color coordinated, and given badges that make them easily identifiable.  In my experience, students and parents are sometimes overwhelmed with a webpage filled with links.  In comparison, the ability of Symbaloo to visually organize links makes online content easily accessible for both students and parents.  Parents, students, and other educators can visit my webmix as they would any other webpage.

Below are examples of the webmixes for my two classes of Civics and Global Studies.  I use it as a management system for the class schedule and all academic content.  Students and parents know that they only need to go to one place to access everything for the class.  If I need more space, I just add additional rows and columns.  After a unit of study, I'll replace the old links with the new.  It turns into the instructional online headquarters of my classes.  I suggest Symbaloo to any educator who has blended learning elements that they need to tie together and effectively manage.


7th Grade Civics:

 

8th Grade Civics: