Organization Is Not A Nasty Word

Last week I wrote about my favorite go-to web sites in my blog post "Where Do I Go?". This week I am going to talk about how I organize my resources in order to share them.

The first thing that I do when I find a resource is save to my Diigo account. Diigo is a social bookmarking site that allows me to access my web resources wherever I go and whatever computer I am on. Steven Anderson wrote about "Why Diigo rocks" several weeks ago. After saving to my Diigo account, I then start thinking about how I want to organize my web resources. I think about who I plan to share them with, and the best way to share the resources.

Two of the places I like to go to organize my resources is Symbaloo and LiveBinders.

1. Symbaloo:  Another way to bookmark web resources and access from any internet enabled computer. This link takes you to the education site. Their bookmarks are called webmixes. You create tiles within a web mix. Each web resources becomes a tile. For instance, I have created a Digital Storytelling webmix and an IWB webmix. Symbaloo is free to use and you can add other people's webmixes to yours. Someone had created a webmix for Blooms, and I was able to add it to my list. You can also make the webmix be your homepage.
   
   How can it be used in the classroom? If you were studying Holiday's Around the World or Animals and their Habitats (or something like that), you could create a webmix that would include only those resources. Then you could embed (using an embed code from Symbaloo) the webmix onto your web page for your students to use. This would be a safe way for them to search web sites and not go out all over the web.
   
2. LiveBinders: A way to organize your resources in an online 3-ring binder. It actually looks like a notebook with tabs and sub tabs "inside" of the notebook. You can add images, videos, web pages, and pdf files (Adobe Acrobat files). You can embed the LiveBinders into your web page. LiveBinders is free and you can make them public or private. You can search LiveBinders by author, Education Category, etc. I have created LiveBinders as a place to store resources and share with the elementary school teachers in my district. I can embed one LiveBinder, or I can embed my entire shelf. Here is a sample of where I have embedded my entire shelf under Elementary Resources.
   
   How can it be used in the classroom? The exact same way that I used in the example above. Whatever you are going to be studying in your classroom, you can create a LiveBinder with all the resources you want your students to use. Then, you can embed the LiveBinder on your web page so that students can just click on it to open it up. That way, students are not traveling all over the internet, but only the web pages you researched.

I hope you enjoy these organizational resources. Why not create one?

Creative Commons Image: 'Gotta get organized' http://www.flickr.com/photos/19517696@N00/2005932