Livebinders: the ultimate way to organize information online for teachers

When I looked into Livebinders, it was to find a way to make online resources easily available to the teachers in my school. I had already started providing links to good resources on my library blog, but I wasn't too sure that the teachers actually looked at these resources. I was looking for a way to display or "catalogue" online resources in an attractive and accessible way. The idea of storing or organizing resources in an online binder was very appealing to the teacher in me and I wondered if it wouldn't appeal to my staff.



Here are the binders that I created for my staff and students. I will embed them on my library website.

 

I took the resources that I had set up on my resource pages on on my library blog and added them to the different pages in the binders. I ended up with some very simple binders. The tabs were the URL's for the different websites and the binder cover was the first website that I linked to in the binder. I knew that I wanted to change the covers to more general photos and I found out how to do that here. When I explored the Livebinders website a little further, searching for information on how to rename and organize tabs, I came across the Livebinders blog and found this post about exceptional binders that people had created. I was very impressed. To me, this was social bookmarking at its finest. Websites, documents, and multi-media on every topic were neatly organized in cool looking virtual binders. It looked like this would be a goldmine for teacher resources and I knew that I would like to further explore these exemplary binders.

I finally figured out how to rename the tabs with simple descriptors instead of having the long URL's I came across the quick guide button in the upper right hand corner.

I clicked on it and this page opened up.

This made the navigation and organization of my binders so easy. I felt that I had won the jackpot of easy instructions.

"Librarians need to take a leadership role, in collaboration with classroom and technology teachers, to teach students the skills, strategies, and tools for organizing and managing digital information" (Berger, P. & Trexler, S., 2010, p. 70). I see Livebinders as a tool that will help me organize pertinent information for my staff and students and also as a tool that I can teach them how to use to organize their own digital information.

My next step in the investigation of Livebinders will be to improve the presentation of my binders and to explore the public livebinders to look for good resources for my library and my staff.

Works cited:

Berger, P. and Trexler, S. (2010). Choosing Web 2.0 tools for learning and teaching in a digital world. Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited.