Education Week - May 22, 2013 - Special Report - S34

S34

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the service’s biggest user bases.
In addition, Symbaloo provides
certification programs for teachers
to learn how to incorporate personal learning environments and
technology into their classrooms.
At the school where the pilot
took place, students created their
own Symbaloo pages with links to
websites they used regularly, such
as their email accounts, links to
their own blogs, and their school’s
website.
Next, Ms. Drexler and Mr. Hollinger taught students how to use
the ples to enhance their research
strategies during a six-week unit
on venomous creatures.
Students used their Symbaloo
pages to bookmark information,
keep track of sources, and save
links to experts in science who
would later review their projects.
Ms. Drexler and Mr. Hollinger
used that opportunity to teach
students how to determine the
legitimacy of different Internet
resources and how to tell if the
information they found was accurate and unbiased.
“This sort of learning actually
helps students organize themselves
in a very busy world,” Mr. Hollinger
said. “Before, when students were
working, they would get lost in the
hubbub of everything that happens
online. We found it was essential for
them to be able to create a space
[for those resources].”

executive

MAY 22, 2013

During the pilot study at the
Florida school, Mr. Hollinger and
Ms. Drexler found that the biggest
challenges were logistical—struggling with slow Internet connections and with Web filters that
blocked sites students wanted to
use, such as YouTube.
To comply with student safety
regulations and keep track of
what students were doing, Mr.
Hollinger installed a program on
his computer that allowed him to
see what students were doing on
their computers—essentially, he
had a window into how each student approached his or her schoolwork.

Striking a Balance
Striking that balance between
allowing students to explore the
Internet’s full potential and keeping them safe and on task can be
challenging, he pointed out, but
Mr. Hollinger has noticed that
when students are allowed more
freedom, they are likely to take on
more responsibility as well.
Since the pilot two years ago,
Mr. Hollinger has moved to an
independent school—the Technology Engineering Science Leadership Academy, or tesla, in Santa
Rosa Beach, Fla.— that is entirely
structured around ples, he said,
and in the three years that he has
used the approach in his classes,
only a small number of disciplinary problems have occurred.

“What we found was that students are enjoying the process of
learning with a personal learning
environment so much that they
really didn’t want to ruin it,” he
said. “They took responsibility for
their own learning and took personal responsibility for the overall
culture and environment in the
classroom.”
At his new school, students
begin their day by logging into
their Symbaloo pages, which provide links to websites for each of
their classes. Students can then
see the resources their teachers
have posted, complete assignments, and turn in their schoolwork.
The school, which operates on

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a project-based learning model,
uses Symbaloo as its backbone,
Mr. Hollinger said.
One particular challenge for
many schools that want to use
the approach is a lack of technology tools to help students take
ownership of their ples, said Ms.
Drexler. What’s ideal for fostering
a strong ple initiative, she said,
is a 1-to-1 school model, in which
each student has access to his or
her own digital device—a laptop, a
netbook, a tablet, or a smartphone.
Throughout the pilot, Ms. Drexler and Mr. Hollinger helped students learn how to vet resources
and determine whether they contained legitimate information.
They also required students to
expand their ples by reaching out
to experts to ask them for help or
advice on their research projects.
“One of the things that’s important is making sure [students]
actually know how to do a good
search beyond Google,” Ms. Drexler said. While students may be
tech-savvy, they need to be taught
how to use those skills in an educational and professional setting,
she said.

Sharing Information
Shannon Miller is a teacherlibrarian in the 600-student Van
Meter school district outside Des
Moines, Iowa, which serves students in grades K-12.
In her district, 6th through 12th
graders receive their own laptops
under a program that started two
years ago. While elementary pupils do not have their own devices,
they also learn in technology-rich
environments using tablets and
other computers, Ms. Miller said.
Teachers may need to create
ples for younger students, but as
students get older, they can take
on the aggregation of resources
on their own and customize their
ples based on how they use them,
said Ms. Miller.
For example, older students
could customize a ple by adding
links to non-school-related resources, such as social-networking
sites, blogs they are interested in,
or videos they have found. They
can also rearrange the way the
tiles are organized on their pages,
such as by grouping school-related
links and putting non-school-related ones in a different area.

Students create their own
Symbaloo Web mixes with
links to digital resources.
The visual nature of
Symbaloo, which
represents each link
with a tile, helps students
organize a variety of
tools and resources,
experts say.

Ms. Miller began using Symbaloo several years ago as a way to
organize information for students
as well as connect to the outside
community.
“It’s a great way for [students]
to share with their parents,” she
said. “All those things coming together in one spot makes what
we’re doing in school more transparent [for our parents].”
Being in a 1-to-1 computing
environment has helped connect
students from the small rural district to teachers, experts, and authors far beyond Iowa, Ms. Miller
said. “It has opened us up to the
world.”
Shelley Breivogel, a 2nd grade
teacher at the 750-student Scott
Elementary School in Evansville,
Ind., discovered ples when teachers at her school began a curriculum-mapping project. They needed
a way to organize the curricular
resources they found, and printing materials out and filing them
seemed cumbersome and even ridiculous in the digital age.
Since then, Ms. Breivogel has
embraced ples as a way to share
information with her students as
well. She organizes units through
Web mixes she creates in Symbaloo and shares them with her
classes. For example, a Web mix
may include links to resources
that explain each of the standards
the class will cover that month.
In light of the Common Core
State Standards, and the related
online assessments that are
scheduled to be integrated into
schools during the 2014-15 school
year, Ms. Breivogel sees ples as
a way to help better prepare students.
“[Students] are going to have to
be able to search for information
online, make connections, analyze
data, move from one source to another, and compare and contrast.
That’s a lot of higher-order thinking skills,” she said. “That [use
of ples] lends itself to enabling
students to be more prepared for
those types of assessments.” n

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Education Week - May 22, 2013 - Special Report

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