Symbaloo EDU

Hi there Symbalooers!

This week, we’re excited to introduce you to Sylvia Buller as our Educator Spotlight. Sylvia is a 4th grade teacher from Resurrection Catholic School in Pennsylvania. Her webmixes are very popular among our educators. She’s been doing an awesome job at bringing technology to her classroom. Sylvia is also very active in the SymbalooEDU Community by joining our weekly #symchat with different educational topic discussions, participating in our contest and sharing her webmixes through Twitter. Thank you for your continuous support Sylvia!

Check out her profile:  http://edu.symbaloo.com/profile/buller

Take a look at our interview with Sylvia as she shares her discovery of Symbaloo and how she is using Symbaloo with her students.

Q1) How did you hear about Symbaloo?

Sylvia: I heard about Symbaloo through Twitter. I noticed educators tweeting out information and resources using webmixes. Symbaloo was also mentioned in some smackdown webinars I found through Twitter. I loved what I was seeing, took a closer look at Symbaloo and have been using it ever since.

Q2) With whom and how are you using Symbaloo?

Sylvia: I create Symbaloo webmixes first and foremost for my students, but I also enjoy sharing them with my coworkers and my Twitter and Edmodo connections.  

The webmixes used in my classroom provide various types of opportunities for learning. They can provide review/enrichment for specific content taught. Such as this Animal United Webmix.

Some are used for student research for reports/projects like our year-long Pennsylvania project.

I can select specific sites at different instructional levels for fun practice of basic skills. (Math, Language Arts webmixes) We also have our own “favorites” webmix for sites we use often and webmixes for many of the major holidays which are used often. When introducing a new unit or approaching a major holiday, I often hear this question from my students: “Is there a Symbaloo for this?” My students love Symbaloo! I enjoy sharing my webmixes with my coworkers and my PLN. I am glad they are useful and can be made available so easily for so many teachers and students.

I worry less about students surfing the web for research and instructional games, etc. since I can direct them to just one webmix filled with information that I have hand selected for them.

Q3) As an administrator how has Symbaloo helped you?

Sylvia: Symbaloo has helped me to organize information on my classroom website better. I was able to take many links off the website and place them on webmixes. This saved space and also made the pages so much more visually attractive.

Symbaloo has enabled me to add more technology into my lessons since I can easily embed so many different items into a webmix.

Symbaloo has helped me connect to many other educators through the sharing of webmixes.

Q4) What is your favorite feature in Symbaloo?

Sylvia: First of all, I do love the new Symbaloo, especially the sidebar! I can’t name just one favorite feature. Symbaloo is great for so many reasons. It is really quite simple to use. The tiles can be customized. It organizes bookmarks very easily. It has a nice gallery. Tiles can be searched. There are color and background options. Webmixes can be embedded and/or linked to my classroom blog and website. The list could go on and on!

Q5) Are you Symbaloo Certified? If so, how has the program helped you?

Sylvia: I took the Basic certification course last summer and plan on taking the second part this summer. Taking the course helped me to learn Symbaloo so much quicker. The lessons and assignments were easy to follow and to complete. I didn’t have to teach it to myself which can be so time consuming sometimes. I hope to teach our faculty how to make their own webmixes and to convince them of the value of Symbaloo in their own classrooms.

 Check out Sylvia’s most popular webmix

Here are some adorable SymbalooEDU feedback from Sylvia’s 4th graders.

Check out her blog post here: http://mrsbuller.edublogs.org/2013/04/24/symbalooedu/#comments

Are you interested in becoming one of our Symbaloo Educator Spotlight? Email us at edu@symbaloo.com and tell us why we should feature you on our next Spotlight.

Hi Everyone!

Meet Lynda Hall, she is one of our favorite teacher-blogger from the Symbaloo Love page.  Lynda is a high school English teacher from British Columbia, Canada, and a Technology Coordinator that is in charge of helping her colleagues incorporate technology in their classroom.

Watch this video as Lynda explains how she stumbled upon Symbaloo, and her feedback on switching from iGoogle to Symbaloo. Lynda tells us how she is using Symbaloo in her classroom and what she has planned for  future use with her students.

Check out Lynda’s tutorial on how to get started with Symbaloo on her blog: http://thede-tech-tive4teachers.blogspot.ca/2012/10/create-symbaloo-homepage-for-your-often.html

We were quite intrigued when we stumbled across Stacy’s blog post, Symbaloo: The possibilities are endless! We shared her blog post on our Symbaloo Love Blog, and invited Stacy to join us on our Educator Spotlight so she can share her experience with Symbaloo and tell us more about the advantages of having her Symbaloo premium account.
Meet Stacy

Stacy Schwab is a Fifth Grade Teacher from John Hancock Demonstration School in Philadelphia. Stacy’s colleague found Symbaloo while searching the internet and shared it with her in November of 2012. Ever since then, Stacy has been using Symbaloo in her fifth grade classroom as a launchpad for organizing all the educational websites they use in class. She is also working on a Symbaloo webmix of kid-friendly sites for her students to use to research their topics for the argumentative essays that they are writing in class.

Here’s a video from our Skype call with Stacy

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 our first Educator Spotlight of the year, we had the pleasure of chatting with two lovely ladies from Evansville, Indiana. Kimber Scarlett and Shelley Breivogel are second grade teachers at Scott Elementary School. They discovered Symbaloo early last year and are using it in several different ways with teachers, students and parents. For example, they collaborate with a few other teachers at their school and together they use SymbalooEDU as apart of their curriculum mapping each month.

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Kimber and Shelley explain the details of their curriculum mapping and other ways they’ve been using SymbalooEDU in the video below. It’s a little bit lengthy but well worth viewing!

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Below is an example of their curriculum webmix for January. Click on the image to get the preview:

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Would you like to have a look at all of the content that Kimber and Shelley have created? You can visit their SymbalooEDU profile here.

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 week our Educator Spotlight features one of our very own PD PRO’s Carol Mortensen. She is the Campus Technology Integration Specialist for Deer Park High School South Campus of Deer Park Independent School District in Texas. We caught up with Carol to learn more about her and how she uses Symbaloo in the classroom.

Watch this video and learn some tips from a PD PRO!

Visit Carol’s upgraded Symbaloo Account at: http://myweb4ed.symbaloo.com

Full Bio of Carol:

Carol Mortensen has nearly twenty-three years of educational experience. She began as a substitute teacher as she worked toward her degree. Upon graduation, Carol began teaching middle school Math and Algebra I and served as the technology liaison for her campus. She served as a teacher for 16 years and was lucky to have taught at Hillcrest Middle School, a 1:1 campus where every student was issued a laptop computer. She also worked as an Instructional Technology Trainer for her district providing training and technology integration support for campus and district staff, faculty and administrators.
Currently, Carol enjoys her position as the Campus Technology Integration Specialist for Deer Park High School – South Campus. Before taking this position this year, she served for three years as the Campus Technology Integration Specialist at Fairmont Junior High in Deer Park Independent School District. In this position, Carol provides integration support and training to the students, staff, faculty, and administrators at the campus and district level. In addition, Carol is an online Math instructor for Aventa Learning and K12.

The Texas Computer Education Association (TCEA) named Carol the Classroom Teacher of the Year for her innovative and creative use of technology to create a 24/7 virtual classroom using her classroom website. Carol has presented at school districts throughout Texas as well as state and local conferences on a variety of technology integration topics. Her article on the use of websites as an instructional tool was recently published in the TechEdge Magazine. In February 2011, her article, Lessons Learning In a 1:1 Classroom, was published by TechEdge. The article was republished in ISTE’s Learning and Leading magazine in August 2011. She was named Fairmont Junior High’s Teacher of the Year for the 2011-2012 school year.
Carol is passionate about the positive impact that technology has on student achievement. Her presentations are packed with real-life solutions, quality resources, and humor. She has an ability to connect with her audience and motivate them to take technology integration to a higher quality level.

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.