Using a Sqworl in the Classroom

Welcome to creating Sqworls for use in the classroom. If you’ve never heard of a Sqworl before, you’re about to find out it’s a very, very cool tool.

You’re not going to have to send your students to the computer to type in those super long URLs when researching something. And it’s wonderful for your own personal use as well.

The Sqworl we’re talking about is obviously not like my little friend here, Mr. Bushy tail, who kind of looks like his tail coming off the top of my head. But I think you’ll enjoy it.

I’m going to send you over to the screencast so that way you can see how it works.

Make sure whenever you finish head right on over to the blog at Organized Classroom to see all of the links for the Sqworls I am going to mention.

Okay. So let’s go through what a Sqworl is first. This is a quick Sqworl that I made up last night. It is for latitude and longitude.

As you can see, it is a collection of different websites or resources that you want to put together. I’ve got a games on here. And a webquest National Geographic game. This link is a word lesson. There is a YouTube video about hurricane tracking, a Quia game, and some more YouTube videos. Finally, I’ve got a teaching video that actually teaches about latitude and longitude.

When students sit down at the computer, they log in, and go to your favorites to find the Sqworl that you want them to do.

They click right on the picture and it will take them right to the specific resource you want them to complete. For example, you could tell them, “Go to the Sqworl for latitude/longitude and do the WebQuest that’s on there. So they log in and get started on it.

So it’s a really, really easy way for students to be able to see it and do it. And you don’t have to have them type anything into the URL bar. BONUS!

So how do you get started creating your own Sqworls?

Go to sqworl.com and click on register. You are going to choose your username. Your it’s optional, whether or not you want to put your own name in, you’re going to put your email address in and your password and you click sign up. And that is absolutely all that you do.

So now I want to show you on mine. I’m going to log in here so you can see what it looks like.

Here are my two different Sqworl accounts that I have, and I am also following four other Sqworls. If you see Sqworls created by other users that you like, you can click on the heart and follow their Sqworls if they have some really good resources.

But what I wanted to show you is if you go down here to where it says Sqworl tools and you click on the browser bookmarklet it will install very quickly right up here on your toolbar. So if you have a website you want to add to your Sqworls, you simply click the bookmarklet and it adds it right away.

So let’s do a practice one to show you how easy it is.

Okay. I am going to go tooth’s good resource that I saw. This looks like a pretty interesting website to add to my Sqworl. I’m going to click on the bookmarklet and it opens up this fancy little box to allow me to add to my latitude longitude Sqworl.

I can put in a short description if I want to. So I’m going to put in ‘earth science mapping’ and I’m going to click add URL. That’s it, that’s all there is to it.

If I wanted to create a whole new group, I could also do that as well. I’m going to close that.

I’m going to go back to my Sqworl to show you a couple more handy things.

Now at the bottom this says thumbnail queue. Just give it a little while and then click the refresh button. It might be too early yet for it. It needs a second to actually pull the screenshot from wherever it is that you want to have on there.

So while we’re waiting for that, I want to show you another great thing that the latitude longitude one is fantastic for just that specific concept that I want students to practice.

I’ll show you a couple other examples. This one I ran across last night and this person is created six different categories for their different subject areas. And I thought it was really, really good because you can just do one for your class. Your class could go into this specific one, find the right subject, say they’re going into math and look at all of these fantastic games and ideas that they have going on in here too.

So let’s go back to our latitude/longitude Sqworl to see if it’s queued up yet.

It has. So there it is. Sometimes you just have to give it a few minutes.

One last quick thing that I’m going to show you what to do is if I want to edit this, I click on edit and I can change not a whole lot, but enough. I can change the description to make it really easy for students to read.

And most importantly, I can change the order. So if you want things done in a specific order, you just click and drag. That’s all that you do. If you want to place all your games together, your smartboard lessons, if you want them to do a self tutorial, then look at a YouTube video, then go to a game. You could put them in that order and tell the students to do it in that specific order, even changing the description to reflect the correct completion order.

So that’s really all there is to doing a Sqworl. It really takes only a few minutes to set up. And especially if you add this little bookmarklet here to it, that is even better.