I just saved hours. It was time for me to clean up my "Favorite Links" section of the website that I maintain for my school. Admittedly, it is a section of the site that usually receives the least attention from me. I constantly maintain the lessons that I post on the site, as well as stay up on my weekly "Link of the Week." But the "Favorite Links" section sometimes grows dusty and suffers from "dead" links. It's hard to keep up with it, but I need a place to put links to the staple sites that teachers and students can easily access.

I've been meaning to overhaul the whole site to weed out the dead links, but more importantly, to include pictures with the links so students can easily spot the sites they seek. Especially with my younger students, the text accompanying the links helps very little but a picture goes a long way. I've been putting off this redesign because I knew it was going to be quite a task. I would have to take screenshots of the sites for the pictures, insert them into my web page, link them to the correct sites, then upload the whole thing to my server. Sounds easy, but trust me, it would have overtaken a good chunk of a day. (I've been holding out for a holiday or a snow day to commit to the task).

But then I found my new best friend: SimplyBox. With SimplyBox, you simply sign up for a free account, install a Firefox add-on, restart and you're ready to go. When you find something that you want to share, you click on the SimplyBox button ("Box and Save"), drag a "box" around the part of the web page that you want to save, and then move that selection down to one of the boxes that suddenly appear at the bottom of Firefox. You can make as many "boxes" as you want (i.e., one for Science, one for Math) and these can even be organized into larger "Containers" (so the Science and Math boxes could be in a container called "School" and I could have another container called "Home" with news articles that I want to read later).

If you head on over to my SimplyBox that I made for my elementary students, you'll see that I grabbed screenshots of the sites I wanted to share with students. Next to the images, is a link ("view source") that students would then click on to get to the site. Students have 3 different options for viewing the link. Up in the left hand corner of the site that is shared, they can select: Free View (which will haphazardly place the pictures on the screen, much like a "coffee table", where they can be dragged around), Grid View (which just shows the pictures of the sites), and List View (which shows the pictures and some information, such as when it was captured with SimplyBox). Next to this area, you'll also see that there are comments that I've put in as descriptions to the sites. Personally, I prefer the pictures only option for my elementary students, however the Free View is engaging and a nice option so long as you don't have too many sites (which will create quite a pile-up).

Using SimplyBox in this manner to provide a list of favorite links for my students is only scratching the surface of the tool's potential. Boxes can be set up and shared with colleagues (they must be SimplyBox members with an account). Under this scenario, comments can be added by multiple users so a conversation can take place, around a shared article or website.

There are a couple of things I'd like added to SimplyBox, such as being able to create labels for each site, have the images linked to the sites (currently it opens up the information window, and my students still need to look for the "View Source" link), and (most importantly) a way to organize the links on the page as I deem appropriate (right now, the last link added is at the top of the page; it would be nice to at least sort them alphabetically). SimplyBox is still in its infancy and I expect these and other improvements in the near future. But for now, it's a quick way to compile links for students and I thank them for the time they saved me.

 
Bob Sprankle has been a multi-age teacher in Wells, ME for 10 years and has served as the school's Technology Integrator for the past two years.

^{POSTED ON HOTCHALK.COM}

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