Monday Made It...Classroom website and Symbaloo

I'm linkin' up again with Tara at 4th Grade Frolics for Monday Made It.  It took me all week last week to look through everyone else's wonderful ideas.  I wrote down so many things that I want to try.  I continue to be amazed by how creative everyone is.  I'm startin' to feel inadequate. Lol...

My Monday Made It...
I have a classroom website that I use for the students and parents.  Any information that they might need, they can always find on our weekly updated website.  There are class procedures, class news, links to websites, and so much more.

I have managed and added to this website for over five years and added many learning links for the students. I was beginning to feel overwhelmed with the list that was growing and having to constantly edit to keep them in alphabetical order. I imagined it was even worse when I would ask my students to go to a "link" quickly and they would have to sort through the links to find what I was asking for.  Although I have the links separated in subject areas and categories, I didn't have them in sub-categories.  I needed to reorganize...big time!

I decided to start with my Science Links because I have over 250+ links.  Here is an example of what my list looked like (this is just a glimpse at Math...I've yet to tackle this one)

Not very visually appealing is it? 

So I asked myself what I needed to do to organize this 

list and how could I make it easier for all parties involved?  

In the past I tried Sqworl, but when I saw Symbaloo I really liked their layout much better.  Maybe it was because it's so colorful.  I joined Symbaloo and started dumping my links.  I'm not going to lie when I say this took some time for me, but it was worth every minute.  I wanted to go back and check to make sure all of the links were still in working order; of course along the way I found more to add.

I went from 250+ in Science down to 12 links for the units of study we will have this year and matched to our state benchmarks(appropriate for 3-5 for sure...maybe other grades also).  Not too bad!

Click here to go to my 12 categories and click on any of the topics to take you to Symbaloo.  Since I have already completed the 12 web mixes on Symbaloo, you are welcome to link back to them or my class website.  I will continue to add more and update them as well as the other subjects in "My Links".

Save yourself some time!  I don't mind! 

Now the only thing I have to worry about is makin' sure the site never goes down...permanently  

Does anyone else worry about those kinds of things?  I guess if they give you notice, it wouldn't be so bad, 

but my fear is I'm goin' to wake up one morning and some website or web 2.0 tool has disappeared...forever. Oh the horror!!!