Think “inside the box” with SimplyBox
January 8, 2009
With so much information available to them on the world wide web, students sometimes need a little guidance when doing research. The million dollar question for educators is how to guide students’ research easily and effectively. A teacher could create a wiki containing links, images, and videos, but this requires a bit of time, which most teachers would argue, is limited. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to easily gather all of these resources and “box” them up to effectively guide student research? With SimplyBox, you can do just that.
SimplyBox touts itself as “a free service to capture, share, and organize anything you find on the web.” Registration for the service is a breeze. The required toolbar works on IE7 or higher and Firefox 2.0 or higher (sorry Chrome and Safari users). The toolbar is only required on the machine of the person creating the boxes, so if students will not be creating their own SimplyBox accounts, they won’t need to install the toolbar on their computers.
After you’ve created your account and logged in, you’ll be able to create your boxes and your containers to hold those boxes (don’t worry, that’ll make more sense once you start playing with it). Here’s an example — I want my US History class to begin research on the Revolutionary War but I want to guide their research at the beginning so they know which direction I’d like them to go. With SimplyBox, I can easily “box and save” images, text and videos for some of the resources I’d like them to use. Once I’ve saved all of the items into my box, I can easily share this box to receive a URL that I would then give to my students to access the resources I’ve saved for them. You can view the Revolutionary War example I’ve created by going here (hint: play with the different Views in the upper right hand corner.)
Research is a great way for students to learn more about the subjects they’re learning. As educators, we can help them out a bit by thinking “outside the box” by going “inside the box” with SimplyBox.-JERRY SWIATEK
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- Tags: organization, research
