A Primary Source Birthday Present to Celebrate the 10th Anniversary of Teacher Librarian Days (#TLD2014)

Geek 2 is an organization nut and sometimes a bookmark list is just too hard to handle and manipulate when looking for resources. So I have looked for alternate options for students and myself!

I have found @Symbaloo to be a great visual reminder and bookmarking tool  to share with fellow colleagues AND with students. The design features and layout are easy to make your own, and can give visual clues to students when accessing preselected sites for research and online discovery.

As part of the Teaching With Primary Sources Teacher Librarian Days 2014, @TwoGeekyTeachers would like to share a primary source Symbaloo created in the last year to assist students with accessing quality primary sources and exemplary research materials and websites with our fellow learners young and more wise. Enjoy!

Primary Source Symbaloo

And PS.... Happy 10th Birthday #TLD2014!

Tech Tools for the Elementary Classroom

#1 – Livebinders

Ok, Livebinders is kind of amazing!!!  So think about the binders you have in your classroom that hold all of your resources.  It’s just like that, but web based!!  You can access those resources from any computer, anywhere!  You need to create an account, but it’s F-R-E-E!    You can view other people’s binders as well!  

#2 Class Pager

Have you ever been to a restaurant or a store and seen those signs that say “Text ‘blahblahblah’ to 55552 to receive coupon codes”?  Well this is just like that!!  You can give your parents a code to text to a number and then you can send them updates via text message!  A good example of this would be to remind them of upcoming tests, parent conference reminders, school event reminders, etc.  SO COOL, right?  Check it out!

#3 Kerpoof

It is a bright, colorful website where you can create movies, cards, drawings, and little books/stories!  This would be awesome to have students use this to create a drawing and/or picture to go with a story they wrote!

#4 Zooburst

“ZooBurst is a digital storytelling tool that lets anyone easily create his or her own 3D pop-up books.”  This is similar to Kerpoof, but it’s a tad bit more user friendly (in my opinion).  So this would probably be great to use in primary classrooms.  This is also available as an app so you can have it on you iPad!

#5 Symbaloo

 It’s like all your bookmarks on one screen!  It creates little “tiles” for you.  You can also create different “webmixes”.  You can have a “webmix” for math and bookmark all your favorite math sites there.  You can create one for language arts, and have all of your favorite online language arts resources right there.  You can also search for other people’s tiles and add them to your “webmix”.  And they tiles are cute little icons, which is great if you are a visual person like me!  It might sound a little confusing now, but go check out the website and play around on it and you will see what I’m talking about!!  You MUST check this one out!!  It’s amazing!  Here is a symbaloo that I have posted on my library website: