Livebinders is a website where you can create, store and share valuable information for the classroom. After creating your virtual binder, you can upload pictures and files as well as create links to important websites. The websites will be displayed within the binder, meaning that students or collaborators do not have to navigate away from the other resources.
Within each binder, you can create different tabs (like pages), as well as sub-tabs to house specific links or documents to accompany what is on the page (See this Christmas binder). Speaking of examples, there is a large selection of featured binders that you are welcome to use. After signing up for your free account you can actually copy and modify public binders that others have created.
To learn how to use Livebinders, they have a tutorial section with videos and print help. You can also utilize Youtube for helpful videos.
Sharing is the greatest benefit of using Livebinders. When creating a binder, you can specify whether it is public (open for everyone to use and manipulate) or private (for your or you invitee's eyes only). When sharing your private binder, you can allow others to collaborate and build the resource with you (student project, possibly?). Students do not need to become users of the site to be able to access and use the binders. You also have the option of embedding your binder into a blog or wiki site.
Simply put, social bookmarking is a way for people to share their internet links with others. Not so simply put, social bookmarking is a method for people to share, search, organize and manage not only their bookmarks, but the bookmarks of colleagues or members of their PLN.
Delicious is probably the most famous social bookmarking site and it is the one I will profile today. If you haven't heard of delicious, sign up for an account NOW!
On a basic level, Delicious is great for saving your own personal bookmarks. You can import bookmarks you've already saved on your computer to your delicious account easily.You can also add a handydelicious tool to your browser that will enable you to save websites to your delicious account with one click (I would highly recommend this). You have the option to keep your bookmarks private or public so that everyone can find the sites you feel are valuable.
One important thing to understand when bookmarking sites on delicious are tags. Tags are the most essential aspect of delicious as they will help you organize and search through your bookmarks. When adding a website to your delicious account, delicious will actually provide you with some suggested tags for that page based on words others have used to categorize that website. For an example, here is a link to my delicious account with all of the websites I have tagged as Web 2.0: http://delicious/andy.cunningham/web2.0. You can further refine your search by combining two or more tags: http://delicious.com/andy.cunningham/web2.0+presentation.
As I said, social bookmarking can be a very effective tool for a PLN. Not only can you direct people to your public delicious page you can also follow other people to see which sites they have identified as being important. Simply search for a user and add them to your network. You can browse through your Network'sdelicious bookmarks and keep up to date with new sites they've added. This could be very effective for a PLC group as people could simply add sites to their delicious account for others in the group to search through.
For those of you who would prefer this transcript in video, watch this:
