TUIT: Mindi Keiner-Rummel, EMS

Mindi Keiner-Rummel is a veteran educator.  In her 23 year career she has been a teacher, counselor, and administrator. Mrs. Keiner-Rummel has been at East Middle School since 2005, mainly in the role of ECE teacher, but also recently as a Math Intervention specialist.

Mindi is also proof that even after more than two decades in education, you should never stop learning and growing . . . particularly in edtech, which is why she is getting a #ShelbyTUITshoutout.  To help her team of teachers gather data on students, she created a Google Form for the first time.  Now they can easily submit observation data on the fly, and the information goes to the Form's Google Sheet for later analysis by Mindi.  Additionally, she is using Symbaloo.  Mrs. Keiner-Rummel first saw it in a differentiated instruction/ELL PD that I had at EMS, and realized its potential for organizing and sharing resources with others in a graphical interface.

Symbaloo is a free and easy tool to use.  You create a "webmix" of resources by making tiles that are directly linked to URLs.  (No long web addresses to type -- just click and go!) The tiles can be customizable in different colors and icons.  Once ready, you can publish the webmix and share the URL for others to visit.  You can edit it as often as you like.  Symbaloo can help with DI. Imagine color-coding tiles red for one group of students, blue for another, and so on; when students visit the webmix, they know what resources/content/activities they are to click on by what color grouping the teacher has assigned.   Of course, you can make many different webmixes: one for each period, for each grade level, etc.  It should be noted that Symbaloo is not limited to webmixes created by teachers. Here is a popular video made by a 7th grader where she discusses using Symbaloo to organize her "personal learning environment" (PLE):

Mindi has been working on a Symbaloo with math sites her colleagues can use. Click and check it out!  Again, it is a work in progress, but already has several useful sites for middle school math.

Mrs. Keiner-Rummel inspired me to finally make my own Symbaloo.  So here's a "Greatest Hits" of my favorite edtech from my various presentations and blog entries so far.  Note the deliberate arrangement of the tiles.  On the left side is student productivity tools, top center is apps, bottom center is data collection/formative assessment tools that create reports and allow tracking of performance, and the right side is tools that help a teacher better organize or manage their classroom environment. (When you are the creator of the webmix, Symbaloo gives you an embed code to plug it directly into your website, as I've done below.)


Congrats to Mindi for her well deserved #ShelbyTUITshoutout!