Using the Collective Knowledge for Benefit ...

I was scheduled to meet with elementary school teachers yesterday …

On paper, the training was supposed to be Promethean “ActivInspire Beyond the Basics” … that can mean sooooo much.  Since I did not do trainings at that school last year, I was not really sure what “beyond the basics” meant for those teachers …

But I wanted the time I spent with teachers today to be beneficial for them and guided by the questions they had …

That is where LiveBinders comes in …

(Stay with me … I will make a connection … eventually)

I knew teachers had some questions about “clickers” (expressions and votes), so I wanted to have some resources to be able to give to them. Since I did not know the exact topics that would be covered, I wanted to have more than enough resources!

I went to LiveBinders and searched for binders using the keywork Promethean or ActivInspire.  I found binders on Activexpressions, Activotes, registering, creating questions, and lots of interactive sites to be used with the ActivBoard.

I could have done a google search or even looked a few sites I have used in the past. However, I was able to use the knowledge of the collective group to my benefit.

When people create a LiveBinder, it is normally because they have found information they want to pull together and remember or share. I was able to save time and searching by looking at the binders others had searched to create!

I liked most of the resources and sites in these LiveBinders but there were a couple of resources or pages that did not really match with my focus or the direction of the school system, so if copying was enabled on the LiveBinder, I made a copy and took out the pieces I did not want to include (I made sure to still give credit to original creator).

Then I needed a way to pull together all the LiveBinders I was finding …

I could make a list on a wiki or webpage …

I could create a symbaloo …

I could make a presentation pulling them all in …

Did you know that you can put a LiveBinder inside a LiveBinder inside a LiveBinder? I could have made one LiveBinder by combining all the LiveBinders I found … (I have done that in the past).

Then I remembered something else I could do on the LiveBinders site! I made a virtual shelf to showcase the specific binders I wanted. After making that shelf, I could embed it on a webpage or put the link somewhere easy to access!

So that is what I did … I put the link to the shelf on the website of the Instructional Technology Department!

Teachers may still have to search a little to find the information they are looking for … but the searched was narrowed (and would not take as much time) since I pulled together resources in LiveBinders that others has already put together!

We had a good day of learning together … and the teachers went away with places to go find the resources we talked about as well as a direction to find even more!

The focus of today was on Promethean and not LiveBinders, but at the end of a couple of the sessions, a few teachers said they were able to see some ways LiveBinders could be used and now wanted to learn more about LiveBinders!

I never know what is going to make an impression and motivate learning …

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