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Manage Your Resources In The Cloud: Symbaloo

@LisaBerghoff/@Joe_EdTech

So many teachers are transforming their classrooms by moving their resources online.  One of the biggest decisions to make when doing this is: How am I going to organize everything?  You want a system that is easy for students to use, accessible to everyone, and simple for you to manage. You may have seen Symbaloo in the past.  This is not a new tool. However, as your needs change it is important to think about finding the best tool for the job for your classroom.  There is not one right answer here and so we as teachers need to put on our problem-based learning hats and solve this one for ourselves.  It is an ongoing process and it's a good idea to revisit some tools that we may have seen in the past.   Symbaloo is one tool to consider when looking to organize your digital information online.  

Symbaloo allows you to make a "webmix", which is a compilation of tiles that link to your online resources.  There is also a Symbaloo gallery that has webmixes already created for you.  Here is a link to  one that I found called "secondary math" . An image of this Symbaloo webmix is shown below.

Your webmix can be embedded on your website or posted as a link to your Google Classroom or other LMS that you might be using.  Anyone using your site can just click on the tiles to be directed to your various online resources.  The use of tiles really helps kids who need the visual cues as opposed to clicking links that are just text based.  I love this tool for reluctant readers or second language learners.

Another great use for Symbaloo is for organizing the online tools that you curate for yourself.  As we fine new websites that we may want to use in our classes, we often decide to bookmark them.  What happens is that our bookmarks tab gets cluttered and we often don't go back and use them because we can no longer find them.  Consider creating a Symbaloo webmix for your own personal organization system.  You can even take this one step further and have students research online tools and create a Symbaloo webmix that shows what they have found.  These webmixes are easy to share, edit, and categorize.  

Do you have favorite tools for organizing your online treasures?  If so, post in the comments below.