Saturday, June 11, 2011

Livebinders - another cool sharing tool for the classroom

I have been meaning to give Livebinders a serious work out for some time, and took the opportunity last night to rearrange a pile of stuff I've been wanting to share with staff at our school for some time, but hadn't found the tool to quite do it.

Here's my problem ... like most of us, I read a lot, usually reading my RSS feeds via Feedler Pro on my iPad. When there is something I want to keep or share with someone else I made the decision I didn't just want to email the link to others - I wanted a way to share with others the rich 'original experience' of the original item. So, I started looking for a tool that could collect all of the items I wanted to keep. I'd been an EverNote user for a while, so decided to try this - and it works well for collecting all of the articles.
The next problem was what to do with all of the articles ... by default they all end up in the same EverNote notebook - so last night I rearranged, merged, tagged items and also created a series of notebooks for the major topics I'm interested in. Then by dragging and dropping the "notes" into the right notebook I have a series of notebooks that can be shared with anyone.

The last piece of the puzzle is to use LiveBinders to present the entire set of notebooks to my audience. The process is simple - head to LiveBinders, create a free account and start creating a digital ring binder with as many tabs as you like - you can put all sorts of content into a tab.
Here's a short video from the Livebinder web site.

For my first its as simple as adding the shared URLof my Evernote notebooks.

So, give Livebinders a try ... they are easy to set up, and very easy to add content to. I can see these being very efficient ways of creating digital textbooks for students, and for students to create digital artifacts.