Symba-who? Symbaloo - Cloud Based Bookmark Manager

Don't like typing out lengthy URL addresses to visit your favorite websites?  Exhausted from helping students correctly type URL addresses?  With Symbaloo, a cloud based visual bookmark organizer, you'll no longer need to type a website's address to access it.  Symbaloo allows users to easily organize bookmarks with images users click to visit websites.  

Create a Symbaloo to use as your homepage and bookmark your favorite websites for easy access.  And don't worry - you'll still be able to quickly complete Google searches, since the center of your Symbaloo will be a search bar. (Don't like Google?  No worries - you can set your Symbaloo to search bing or Yahoo! instead.)  Your Symbaloo is stored on the cloud, which means you can access it any time from any device and you don't need to worry about it being deleted.  

Because you can create (or follow) as many Symbaloos as you like, you will be able to create webmixes (Symbaloo's name for their unique visual bookmark pages) for your students as well as for yourself.  You can create a Symbaloo of websites your students frequently use and embed it onto your blog or Haiku.  You can create a Symbaloo for a specific project.  You can follow a Symbaloo of technology resources or educational resources, etc.

Not sold yet?  Check out this video:

Or check out this Symbaloo Lindsay Brennan created for John Caldwell's 6th students: 

There are hundreds of public webmixes online at Symbaloo that you can subscribe to.  Take a peek here and start webmixing today!

Organize and Utilize Your Photos

Google Photos is a convenient way to organize photos and videos from your classroom. Your account is linked to your Graland Google account so you can easily:

• Post photos and videos to your blog or Google site to share with parents. 
• Share photos and videos with your supervisor on your professional digital portfolio. 
• Upload pictures from your iPhone or iPad using the Google Photos app. It's free! 

The Google Photos app is such a simple way to organize, save, and share your photos. You can take photos on your iPhone or iPad, upload them to the app, and delete from your phone to save space.

Once the photos are "living" in your app and your Google Photos, you can easily access them when posting information on your blog or Google site.

If you have many photos to share, just choose one or two photos to post and then say "Click here to view more photos". When you go to Google Photos, you can get a link to the album you want to share and link it on your blog post. 

Organize your photos into albums to keep yourself organized. When I taught LS Science, I had an album for each grade level and just added photos and videos throughout the year. Classroom teachers may want to create albums by project, activity, or trip to easily share with families.

Let me know if you have questions or would like help setting up your Google photos.

Elizabeth (eleddy@graland.org)