Symbaloo EDU

This month we would like to feature Jeffery Heil for our Educator Spotlight. He is currently a technology resource teacher for the San Diego County Office of Education and also an adjunct professor at California State University of San Marcos. He found Symbaloo at the CUE Conference in Palm Springs last year and decided it would be a good tool for his students to use for their digital portfolios. View the video below as we discuss details of how he is currently using Symbaloo with his students.

Here is a webmix Jeffery created as an example for his students:

It appears that his students really enjoyed his class along with learning about Symbaloo. Check out their examples below to see their digital portfolios and comments about Jeffery’s class:

See more of our featured educator’s here.

If you would like to be featured on our Educator Spotlight, send us an email and tell us how you are using Symbaloo.

For this months Educator Spotlight we want to share a SymbalooEDU story from the administrator perspective. Alain Noel was kind enough to share his story with us. 

Alain is the curriculum consultant and IT integration for the  Centre franco-ontarien de ressources pédagogiques, a school board in Ontario, Canada. 

We have been working with Alain for the past few months on professional development with his teachers. His teachers have participated and successfully completed the PD Symbaloo Certification program. They have also integrated SymbalooEDU in to their classrooms.

Below is a video recap on his thoughts on SymbalooEDU and how it has helped him as an administrator:

This may be a long video (15 min.) but is worth the watch. Alain covers how participating in the Symbaloo PD Certification Program has helped his teachers and administrators to see the value of using not just SymbalooEDU but other web tools in the classroom.

Here is a recap of the video if you are limited on time:

• Introduced SymbalooEDU to help promote the use of the interactive whiteboards since they were not being used properly in the classrooms. Wanted to utilize the interactive whiteboards as a tool for learning rather than just a cool gadget to impress the students with.
• With a limited budget and having to cover such a large territory he finds that SymbalooEDU really helps them to cut down on costs and a great way to connect and share resources.
• Lynn Riutta a teacher who was introduced  to SymbalooEDU along with Alain loves it and is using it to build all of her lessons for the classroom.
• She finds that it is a passive way to maintain control of the students web environment.
• Alain has found that it is a continual discovery and dependency that they have developed with the use of SymbalooEDU.
• As an administrator SymbalooEDU has a lot of potential to help their school board financially because it saves them time and expenses it would cost to do these “professional networks” or “professional development” workshops.
• An example of how well SymbalooEDU works for him, Alain set up a webmix with training materials for several principals and within 20 minutes the principals had set up Symbaloo accounts and had access to their trainings. This led the administrators to seeing the value of SymbalooEDU in the classroom with their students.
• The Symbaloo Certification Program showed the teachers how they can change the way they deliver content because they lived the experience of learning with SymbalooEDU. The teachers realized their roles as facilitators rather than content providers.

It has been such a pleasure to work with Alain and we are happy to share his success story. We’d love to hear your story if you are working with SymbalooEDU at your school or district:  Submit content here.

We had the pleasure of meeting Shelley Owen, our featured Spotlight Educator, last year at the OC CUE Tech Fair. She is a technology leader for Glendale Unified School District and is currently based at Valley View Elementary School. Shelley is an extreme power user of Symbaloo and is a Symbaloo Certified Educator.

You can view her Symbaloo profile here. 

How did she find Symbaloo?

While attending a virtual technology conference in another state she saw a snippet of the “My PLE” video. She was so impressed that she immediately searched for Symbaloo and started to build her webmixes that very same day. Since then she has been integrating it in several aspects of her educational life.

How is she using it?

• Utilizes webmixes with gathered resources as a starting point for students in her computer lab
• She presents at a lot of local tech conferences and uses it as a presentation tool
• Allows for students to use webmixes with resources as bibliography for research papers
• Uses webmixes for professional development workshops
• For sharing resources and collaborating with other educators at events

Below are some examples of her webmixes:

Kinder Computer Center

Computer Lab Math

Why Shelley loves Symbaloo:

• “SymbalooEDU webmixes provide a safe and easy online learning environment for our elementary students. They are so visual and easy to use.”
• “It has made bookmarking online educational resources for my students so much more organized and visually appealing. I maintain over 3000 links on another bookmarking service, with Symbaloo I am able to pull only the relevant links from the giant list to display to students.”
• “Also, I can change a tile easily at any time to suit our monthly computer. I really like that I can customize the graphics of the tiles and the wallpaper background. Also, embedding Google Docs, YouTube and other online resources is a huge bonus!”

Not only do we enjoy Shelley’s enthusiasm and support for our tool but also her dedication to education. We are glad to have her as a part of our Symbaloo Certified Community.

See more of our featured educator’s here.

If you would like to be featured on our Educator Spotlight, send us an email and tell us how you are using Symbaloo.

Mobile learning is starting to gain popularity as more schools go 1 to 1 with laptops, tablets, iPads and more. For this “Educator Spotlight” we are featuring Jon Samuelson, also known as @iPadSammy on Twitter.

He is a fourth grader teacher at Cedar Creek Elementary and a major mobile learning advocate. Jon hosts iPad and mobile learning labs in his district to help other educators get more familiar with using mobile devices with their students. View our Skype chat below to find out more about Jon:

Jon caught our attention through his popular “60 in 60″ webmix that features all of the apps mentioned in Brandon Lutz “60 Apps in 60 minutes” ISTE session. He has gone on to create more highly appreciated webmixes that are not only used by colleagues and students but by parents as well. Find more webmixes by Jon here and connect with him on Twitter here.

Here is the 60 in 60 webmix he created:

Jon works at quite an affluent and flexible school district, Eanes ISD. Along with providing all of their teachers with iPad 2′s, they also have a BYOT (bring your own technology) policy. Each student is able to bring a mobile device to school to work and learn with. According to Jon, the students love Symbaloo because it’s visual and gives quick access to all of their resources.

We’ve found that many of our Spotlight Educators discovered Symbaloo through Twitter. Please fill out the survey below, we’d love to know how you found us!

See more of our featured educator’s here.

If you would like to be featured on our Educator Spotlight, send us an email and tell us how you are using Symbaloo.

This spotlight educator was discovered via a Twitter chat for Kindergarten teachers called #kinderchat. We tracked down Matt Gomez on Twitter to learn more about #kinderchat and how they are using SymbalooEDU to share resources amongst each other.

Matt, a married father of 3 and kindergarten teacher in Dallas, Texas found Symbaloo at a conference and has since used it with his students and #kinderchat peers.

He manages the Symbaloo webmixes for #kinderchat and has 3 published for public consumption. Click on Matt’s Photo left to see the #kinderchat webmixes. Watch our Skype chat below to learn more.

Matt says that by using Symbaloo, he is spending more time setting up his webmixes  in the beginning but saves time later by only having to update, edit and build upon his mixes.  Find more webmixes created by Matt via #kinderchat’s Symbaloo profile here and connect with Matt on Twitter here.

Here is the ABC #kinderchat webmix that Matt curated for the #kinderchat group:

See more of our featured educator’s here.

If you would like to be featured on our Educator Spotlight, send us an email and tell us how you are using Symbaloo.

Last week we received an email that really made the team here at Symbaloo quite proud. We love getting praise from Symbalooer’s but every once in a while someone happens to go out of their way to write such a nice note just to let us know how much they love Symbaloo. The email below from Molly Mullee, the Dean of Instructional Technology at Notre Dame Academy, was circulated throughout the team Symbaloo:

We were so touched that we followed up to hear what Molly’s students have to say about Symbaloo:

We learned some interesting things from our conversation with Molly Mullee:

It’s AMAZING…My class cannot stop talking about it, teachers are going crazy….I’ve been searching for this kind of thing forever. – Molly Mullee, Dean of Instructional Technology at Notre Dame Academy

• Twitter – Molly, like many of our users found Symbaloo through Twitter
• Uses – Her school currently uses Symbaloo for their digital portfolio/resources page
• Learning Styles – Molly was able to observe her students learning styles immediately by having them create their own Symbaloo webmix
•  Students – The students at Notre Dame Academy like using Symbaloo to stay organized, find educational resources, create projects, save their work online and most importantly to stay focused. The students say this has helped improve their academics, and even improved one student’s grade from a C to an A.
• Notre Dame Academy is using a premium SymbalooEDU account so they can easily share the best of the web with their staff, parents and students. The teachers at Notre Dame Academy are also working on their Symbaloo Certification.

Do you use Google Apps at Your School?

If so, you may find this tip useful from this week’s Spotlight Educator.

Cindy Brock Technology Coordinator, TN

Meet Cindy Brock a Technology Coordinator for Presbyterian Day School in Memphis, TN. We recently caught up with Cindy on Skype to learn more about how she is using SymbalooEDU in her school.

Cindy is lucky enough to have a laptop cart in every class and her school uses Google apps. She was looking for an easier way for her 1st through 3rd graders to access online resources when she stumbled upon Symbaloo while on Twitter. She has since created a webmix for each subject for grades 1-3 and embedded them into Google Sites, which ends up looking like a custom graphical interface for her youngest students to access with ease. She then shared the webmixes with her colleagues and then together they introduced it to the students.

Listen to this snippet from our conversion to see how the integration went:

To embed a webmix into your blog or website. watch this quick tutorial:

To learn more about how educators are using SymbalooEDU see our other Educator Spotlight’s and the Symbaloo ♥ page.

Nancy Tyrell,
Aurora City School District, OH

Our latest spotlight educator was discovered through the vast number of users installing one of her webmixes. We tracked down Nancy Tyrrell to ask her about her Social Studies 8 webmix [pictured below] that has almost 3 thousand installs.

“My philosophy is to empower the student to become a lifelong learner - to seek information by questioning and problem solving through inquiry-based learning. You are your own best teacher!”

Nancy, a teacher of 11 years, enjoys alternative approaches to classic bookwork. She uses Symbaloo to create a webmix for each chapter in her Social Studies class. By organizing the links into upper, middle and below average learning levels for the students she creates lesson plans that both supplement and compliment the text book.

Nancy says one main advantage to using a webmix is to have a starting point full of resources for her students to access. This saves her students so much time when doing research papers. If they have extra time and want to explore more resources, she also gives them this option. Another way Nancy uses Symbaloo is to give all her students access to resources when they are at home. She fights for time in her school’s computer lab and finds that giving the students access from home makes more sense for her students. Find more webmixes created by Nancy via her Symbaloo profile here and connect with Nancy on Twitter here.

Here is another webmix that Nancy curated for the French and Indian War:

See more of our featured educator’s here.