Symbaloo: Personalized landing page or Dashboard or teaching tool

This weeks tool is free, simple to use, and flexible.

Fed up with navigating to different sites when you go online? Would you like a way to see at a glance all the sites you visit regularly? Symbaloo lets you create a page with links to all of the sites you want to see. Symbaloo functions as a Dashboard (a webpage that collects or links and information).

The page uses 'Tiles' (squares that link to another webpage or information - like Windows 10 does).

Personalized Homepage

You can use it as your personal homepage (first page you see when you open the internet) with links to all of the sites you use regularly. You can link it to your social media accounts (Twitter / Facebook etc) / News / Email accounts so when you open your internet browser, you can see everything on one page. You can allow it to store the log in details to your different accounts too, so no remembering passwords, although this is not advisable. (NB - if you do this, ensure your homepage is private, and that you have a very good password for Symbaloo!)

Teaching / Training Tool

If you're teaching a class and you want your students to access a series of websites, and don't want them to get distracted, or have trouble navigating to the relevant link, you can create a page with all of the links in one place, and share the page with them. You can see one I created for bespoke training here.

How does it work?

1) Sign up for your free account.

2) Click on the + sign on the tabs

3) You can choose to create your own mix, or to use an existing one (template). (I find it helpful to use a template to start with, and adapt it, so I can learn how to use a tool)

4) once you have your Webmix (page) Click on any tile, and you'll be presented with a menu to add your links, with options to give it a colour etc. If you have a website you want the tile to go to, and you have the web address (URL) then rightclick on a tile, paste in the address, and click enter, and your tile will be created, linking to the page.

5) If you want to make Symbaloo your homepage, there is a link next to the Symbaloo logo.

6) If you wish to share the links with a group, or make them public, then you simply click on the share option. Be aware that this makes your site searchable on the internet, to the public.

Symbaloo is a great, easy to use tool that can make teaching so much simpler, and save a lot of time navigating to a range of websites when you go online.