Different ways to use Symbaloo (Part 3)

August 28th, 2010 • updates
Tags: art, community, lena wargo, share, symbaloo

Symbaloo is most commonly used as a personal startpage.  By setting it as your homepage on your browser, you can start with your online favorites everyday. Over time we have seen it progress and used in many other ways.  Each week we will be posting a different way that Symbaloo can be used. This is week 3: Symbaloo as a Community Platform. Come back weekly to get more details.

Community Platform

If you have a passion such as art, you may know all of the best links surrounding that particular subject.  With our Symbaloo Service platform you can request to have a community around your passion, a place where other Symbaloo users with the same interests can communicate with each other. For example, the Art Community, Lena is crazy about art and leads the art community on Symbaloo. She has created multiple webmixes with very useful links around art and networks them on different social networks. She also uses the service platform as a tool to communicate and update other users about her webmixes. Here is a cool example of one of her webmixes, Zombie Art.

You can join the art conversation by clicking here. For more information on starting your own Symbaloo community email Kimmie.

Symbaloo update August 17th

August 23rd, 2010 • Uncategorized
Tags: design, tour, update

On Tuesday August 17th, Symbaloo completed an update with a few improvements.

• Improved designs for the display of newsfeeds in the center box
• Option to choose how the center box starts: with Google Search, your favorite news or a useful widget. (find it under my preference)
• Better image – upload for new tiles

Furthermore, our technical team developed a “tour” widget, which explains to newcomers the concept of Symbaloo in 5 easy steps. The wizard starts automatically for new users. Would you like to try it yourself? Type “tour” in the tile search.

How Twitterfeeds are displayed since last deploy

A New Resource for Teachers

August 12th, 2010 • EDU
Tags: class, EDU, learning tool, ple, school, schools, Teacher resources, teacher tools

Educational resources for teachers

These days there are many online tools and resources for teachers in the market, with the attempt to make classes more interactive and appealing. After Symbaloo’s launch, we have received a large number of emails in which people have stated that Symbaloo is a great resource for teachers. Some teachers even say that Symbaloo is amongst the most promising educational resources on the web, especially because it works very good as a Personal Learning Environment (PLE)

Symbaloo features

The visual interface and ease of aggregating content and sharing it, makes Symbaloo a great resource for teachers. With Symbaloo you can:

• Gather the best content on the web about 1 topic, and present it on a webmix
• Share a webmix with other teachers, and students
• Discover useful webmixes in the Symbaloo Gallery to use in the classroom
• Share a webmix with parents to provide some insight of the used materials

A worthy mention: Symbaloo is free of charge and doesn’t include any annoying ads.

Symbaloo as an educational teacher resource in Holland

In Holland, where Symbaloo has been founded, the most popular webmix is Digibord. This webmix is created by a teacher and is used in many classes on the digital board in the classroom (smartboard). It has been installed over 45,000 times in the last school year. This photo is of a Dutch classroom that is using a smartboard with Symbaloo (we found it on a Dutch newssite for teachers).

At Symbaloo, we think our tool can be used perfectly as one of the main resources for teachers . Once everything is set, Symbaloo can be used as the central point for gathering content for the class and for the students.

Start the discussion about Symbaloo as an educational resource in your classroom

For the school year that starts this September, we would like to do something extra for schools. Currently we’re working on a special EDU version of Symbaloo with the best online content, so all teachers can start right new school year with a great resource. We are interested in knowing which topics you would like to have a webmix for, or if you already have one please share it with us!

We are looking forward to your ideas and input, so we can all benefit from finding the best educational content on the web. You can share your ideas with us and other teachers at our “Education” forum.

You also might be interested to see:

• A French overview of all school webmixes
• Dutch Digibord
• A webmix with all EDU resources made by a teacher
• Follow Symbaloo EDU on Twitter
• Our recently launched PLE tool
  

Different ways to use Symbaloo (Part 2)

August 10th, 2010 • updates
Tags: adtech, event resource, hotel, restaurant, symbaloo, webmix

Symbaloo is most commonly used as a personal startpage.  By setting it as your homepage on your browser, you can start with your online favorites everyday. Over time we have seen it progress and used in many other ways.  Each week we will be posting a different way that Symbaloo can be used. This is week 2: Symbaloo as an Event Resource. Come back weekly to get more details.

Event Resource

Have you ever attended an event and wanted to know which major people or companies are going to be there? Or maybe the best hotels or restaurants in the area? You can search to see if a webmix has been generated for an event you will be attending and if there isn’t one available you can create one and share it with other people who will be attending. Check out this example that was made for Ad-Tech New York.

This is a great way to find out more information about an event, book hotel and flight and see what there is to do around the event!

Email us if you would like more information on how to set this up.