Symbaloo | Official Blog

Volunteer developers wanted

October 25th, 2010 • Uncategorized • No comments

Our development team is finalizing the last steps in building an API for Symbaloo. This means external developers can interact with Symbaloo, and/or use Symbaloo data.

If you’re a developer and share our love for Symbaloo, it would be great to get to know you. We like to run some test projects before we launch the API, so we are curious to hear your ideas and see if you like to build something.

Interested? Please send an email to our CTO Koen Dantuma, [koen at symbaloo.com].

Official Launch of SymbalooEDU

September 21st, 2010 • EDU, updates • No comments

Symbaloo is proud to announce the official launch of SymbalooEDU, a dedicated version for teachers and students. SymbalooEDU was created with the input of educators. SymbalooEDU comes with the ability to embed various web 2.0 tools from across the internet. Tools like Google Docs, Flickr, Slideshare, TeacherTube and more are now fully functional from within SymbalooEDU, making it a safe environment for students to gather resources and store the media onto an eportfolio.

Wendy Drexler, educational researcher and former K12 teacher who recently worked with over one hundred 7th grade science students shared that “SymbalooEDU is truly a tool that can empower students and if applied with teacher support, can facilitate digital literacy skills and support life long learning.” Randy Hollinger, middle school science instructor says, “Our students use SymbalooEDU to organize their networked tools and websites, save their work online as an eportfolio and then share their portfolios with one another for peer review…a great tool to teach your kids how to be a networked learner.”

SymbalooEDU comes with new possibilities of school branding, default content customization and webinars, for teachers who would like to know more about integrating other web 2.0 tools with SymbalooEDU. We encourage all teachers to participate in helping contribute and improve SymbalooEDU’s content and usability.

Please visit SymbalooEDU to get started today!

Embed your faves

September 15th, 2010 • updates • 6 comments

Today we are extremely excited to introduce our latest feature, the ability to embed other online applications such as YouTube videos, Flickr photos, Google Docs and more on Symbaloo. We have been discussing how we can make Symbaloo more fun and easy to use. Our team all came up with the same conclusion: why should Symbaloo users have to navigate to so many different sites just to enjoy their favorites? Here are the list of current applications that you will be able to embed on Symbaloo:

google docs
flickr
liveleak
picasa
schooltube
slideshare
teachertube
twitpic
google video
vimeo
youtube
twitvid
animoto
yahoo video

On this page you learn how to embed on Symbaloo.

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Here are a few examples of webmixes that have been created using these new embed features. The first one is about online fun stuff and the other is on the dolphin. We’d love to see how you use the new embed features on your Symbaloo, share them here in our comments or our Twitter and Facebook. Is your favorite site not a part of the list? Reply with a comment listing the application and we will look into whether or not it is possible to embed.

This is just the start of the embed possibilities. We will continue adding more applications to our list of embed options, making your Symbaloo function even better.

Symbaloo on your iPhone or iPad

September 8th, 2010 • updates • 3 comments

We love using Symbaloo on our iPhones or iPads, but opening the browser and typing the url over and over again can be too time consuming. So here’s a little guide that explains how to bookmark Symbaloo on your iPhone or iPad screen. It’s just 3 simple steps, explained in the images below.

symbaloo-iphone

Symbaloo-ipad

iphone-symbaloo

ipad-symbaloo

Different ways to use Symbaloo (Part 3)

August 28th, 2010 • updates • No comments

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 • No comments

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

twitter-feeds-symbaloo

A New Resource for Teachers

August 12th, 2010 • EDU • No comments

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 • No comments

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.

Different ways to use Symbaloo (Part 1)

July 29th, 2010 • updates • No comments

Online portfolio

This week we are introducing the option of Symbaloo as an online portfolio. This is great for freelance writers and bloggers or even designers who use a portfolio to present their work. You can have all of your work published on one webmix and just send your potential clients the link. Below is an example from Daniela Bolzmann.

It’s an easy and creative way for Daniela to share her online social media portfolio. Daniela compiled links to her blog, online social profiles, and social media groups all in one webmix. This enables her to send just one link to potential clients.

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

Symbaloo Bookmarker for Chrome

July 26th, 2010 • Uncategorized • 2 comments

symbaloo-bookmarker The Symbaloo bookmarker for Firefox has been published a while ago, and as of today the Symbaloo bookmarker for Chrome is ready too. With the Chrome bookmarker, you can easily add the website you are surfing on to your Symbaloo page, just by clicking the extra button that appears in your Chrome browser.