SYMBALOO

Ok, I know it has been a while since my last post, but I have been so busy that I forgot about me!  I actually love to find new technology and share how I will use it in my classroom.  But as usual, I let life get away with me and I forgot to blog. But, I am back, and I found a really neat site for students to create their own bookmarks of important sites and activities on one topic.  Now I know there might be other sites, but Symbaloo looked fun.  I thought about my students and what they would like and Symbaloo seemed to be the best choice.


What is Symbaloo?  Organized links.  Ok' if you have a lot, this might not be the way to go.  But for my students, it is extremely user friendly and they can access their most common links all on one page.

Then my thought was, "How could I use Symbaloo in class and show students how great it was?"  Review, that's it.  I designed a project were they would have to create a " webmix" or one tab in Symbaloo that would review Rational numbers.  I designed the project sheet with step by step instructions and graphics that explained the process.  Then students would always have a tab to go to if they needed to review a fraction, decimal or integer concept.  This project would allow them to explore Symbaloo and find great links to review math.  Students must have an email account accessable at school.  Our district just set up email accounts for each student this year, but my students are still having trouble accessing them. So my students set up a gmail account because our school allows access to this email.

There are two sites for Symbaloo.  There is SymbalooEDU at http://edu.symbaloo.com/  and then just Symbaloo at http://www.symbaloo.com/ .  The difference between the two is that the EDU site has webmix's set up that are educational already and you can actually pay for an educator package.  I of course am a poor teacher and set up my free account at SymbalooEDU, but had my students set up theirs at Symbaloo because it was also free for them.  Downfall, they have to publicly share or send out address to all of their classmates if they want to share and to me in order to access their Symbaloo.  It is also a little harder for me to grade, because each student had to give me their URL or sign in so I could grade their project.  Not that big of a deal, but if your a teacher that hates to spend excess time checking each, via my process, then free might not be for you.
If you would like to use my project page just click on Symbaloo Project and sites sheet to access my google doc.  Feel free to change it up and use it how you like.  If you have suggestions on making it better, let me know. Here is my page I made really fast for an example to show my students:

If you click on it, a link will take you to my Symbaloo.