The Power of Symbaloo

Does the thought of students using the internet in your classroom stress you out?

It sure did us!!!!

A few years ago, with the adoption of common core, our county made a push for student led research in the classroom as a part of the new writing standards. One of the research outlets was the internet.  What??? You expect us to let our KINDERGARTENERS use the internet to look up information?

No way! 
We freaked out!  How would we monitor the sites they were visiting?  How in the world can we keep them safe on the internet? How could we control the pages they clicked on to ensure they were on task? 

We thought there would not be a feasible answer for our classrooms; that is, until we discovered the power of Symbaloo.

 

Symbaloo is like Pinterest for websites!  It is a way to collect and organize sites in the form of a "webmix." 

We decided to start small. Here is an example of a webmix we created to test our kids with.  It has all of the StoryBots letter songs A-Z.  We set this as a computer/tablet/iPad home page, and the students simply click the letter song they want to listen to.  That simple! 

We used this for a couple of weeks, and they did great!  Fortunately, we were able to embed these videos in such a way that our students could not click on anything else when the video started, so they were not able to visit any other sites. 

 

(One of the FANTABULOUS things about Symbaloo, is that you don't have to create every webmix you use.  There are thousands out there to browse through that others have created and shared! Click the picture above to try it out this StoryBots webmix with your kiddos!)

When we felt like they had a pretty good handle on how to use the interface, we became a little more purposeful with our webmixes and created pages that our students could use to research specific topics.  These buttons bring up specific websites (National Geographic Kids, etc..) for the students to visit.  Click on any of the mixes below to check them out!

Our kids absolutely LOVE to research on the internet, and we are now comfortable with them doing it in a way that we feel is safe and directed.

 

 

You can find webmixes for just about anything!  So just get out there and search!  Here is an awesome mix a co-worker created for our Kinders to choose books to listen to!

You can use a mix without an account; however, if you want to collect the webmixes to easily find agian, you will need to create a free account! When you create an account, you can follow mixes that you find, or create your own!
We hope this is something you will check out and can hopefully use in your classroom. 
If you have any questions that we may be able to answer, please feel free to shoot us an email at markersandmascara@gmail.com.

Happy "Symbalooing!"