More Sharing Features Added to LiveBinders

We have added a few new features to LiveBinders:

Share a shelf – You can easily share an author’s collection of public binders. Just click on the author’s name (or your name) under a binder, you will then see their shelf page with all their public binders. On the right will be a url that you can send to anyone:

Add description to profile – You can now add a description to your profile with your website or blog link. This description will show up when someone clicks on your name:

Private binders identified – You can now see at a glance which of your binders are private on your “My Binders” shelf. They will be identified with this “Private” icon:

Easier to upload files – We have made the file upload interface easier to use.  Although we support uploading multiple file types, pdfs and .jpgs are the ones that will show up inside the browser most reliably.  Microsoft Office file types will only show up inside the binder in Internet Explorer.

Thank you to the LiveBinders users who reported bugs and requested features! Please continue to let us know how to make LiveBinders better for you.

Teaching Critical Thinking Skills

We had two teachers develop binders this month to help their student think critically when researching information on the web:

Research Skills & Climate Change Read Beth’s blog post on this binder.

Internet Literacy

You may also want to check out our recent blog post: “10 Great Ways that Educators are using LiveBinders”.

New Copy Features Added to LiveBinders

In response to several requests, we have added the following features to LiveBinders:

1. No Copy Option – You now have a choice as to whether your public binders can be copied. By default, all binders can be copied.  To change your public binder to disable copy, go to  Edit Menu > Properties > Access and choose “Public – Copy Disabled”
   
2. Copy from Within a Binder – Now you can create a copy of a binder from within the binder you are viewing.  To copy, make sure you are logged in, then click on the ‘copy’ link located above the binder tabs next to comments.
   
3. Embed from Within a Binder – You can now get the embed code for a binder from within that binder by clicking on the “E” icon next to the Facebook and Twitter icons at the bottom of the binder page.
   

Thank you to the LiveBinders users who reported bugs and requested features.  Please continue to let us know how to make LiveBinders better for you by sending email to feedback@livebinders.com.

10 Great Ways that Educators are Using LiveBinders

It is so much fun to go to the LiveBinders site and see all the new ways that educators are using LiveBinders.  Everyday that I go to the site I see a new interesting binder,  so I thought it would be great to highlight some of examples in this post:

1. ePortfolios – I think Jackie Gerstein created one of the first ePortfolios on LiveBinders and it is still one of the best:
   
   Jackie Gerstein, Ed.D.
2. Computer Lab – Are you always finding more sites that you want to share in the computer lab?  If you keep them in a LiveBinder, the students always have access to your latest finds, like this one created by user ‘dboyd’:
   
   Student Internet Sites
3. Administration – Sometimes there is an event at school (like state testing) where the information changes constantly and things need to be posted in one place so that everyone has everything they need to know in one place. This binder from user ‘mstoraasli’ is a great example:
   
   PLAN Testing Info 2009
4. Library – This is a great Library Media Center binder from ‘joquetta’ who has clearly done an excellent job organizing all this information:
   
   Library Media Center Milford Mill Academy
5. Student Assignments – One class grouped all of their drawings together for an interesting puzzle cube assignment into LiveBinders:
   
   Brandon’s Puzzle Cube
6. Collecting things to read -  How do you organize all those great links from tweets so that you can find them later when you need them?  Mary Johnson organized her reading material in this LiveBinder and was kind enough to make it public so that the rest of us can read these great articles, too:
   
   Professional Reading
7. Preparing for lessons – ‘xmath’ put together this great binder for teaching kids about upcoming Veteran’s Day:
   
   Veterans Day Resources
8. Posting course materials - This binder on the “Introduction to Internet” from user ‘peterclearly’ organizes all the course materials neatly into tabs and subtabs:
   
   Introduction to Internet LF2547
9. Sharing resources - A group of 25 teachers were all collecting separate links.  By using the same account, they combined all their links into one binder, so they could quickly gain access to all the latest sites.
   
   Social Media and Web 2.0 Web Sites
10. Best resources on a subject – Teresa McGee’s ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ binder, Colleen Young’s ‘Wordle – educational uses’ Binder, and Sheeler’s Edgar Allan ‘Poe’ binder are all excellent examples of collecting the best resources on a subject:
    
    Leonardo da Vinci
    
    Wordle – educational uses
    
    Poe
11. Fun – Ok, I know I was going to stop at 10, but who says binders are all work and no play? I loved Nancy Devine’s collection of ‘Pumpkin Recipes’:
    
    Pumpkin recipes

Import Delicious Bookmarks into LiveBinders

Now you can import delicious bookmarks directly into a LiveBinder. Here is how you do it.

We also made a couple other changes to LiveBinders:

1. Binders will now default to private.  When you create a new binder, the default setting will be private, but you can change it at the time you create it or any time later.
2. ‘LiveBinder It’ testing.  Some urls don’t like to sit in the binder (like Twitter) so we have to insert them as links.  We now test for this when you are using ‘LiveBinder It’ from your browser.  This test takes 10 seconds, but is necessary to build the binder correctly.

Thanks to everyone who helped us find issues and bugs.  You are helping us make every release of LiveBinders better than the last.

Have you seen these great binders on Internet safety that thebyrditlady created?  These might be good to share with your students:

Internet Safety

FACEBOOK PRIVACY

A Library of LiveBinders for Teachers

Educators have been creating some great LiveBinders that are excellent resources for other educators. We thought we would pull them together in this wiki as a Library of LiveBinders organized by subject and grade level. We would love to hear your input on other ways to organize these great binders.

Please take a look at this wiki and let us know your thoughts.

Also, here are some tips and tricks for those of you who are building LiveBinders to share with others:

LiveBinders Tips and Tricks

My Favorite Thing – Finding Something Instantly

When someone just tweeted that they needed a source for free powerpoint templates and backgrounds, it took me just seconds to find the template site that I have used in the past – even though it has been over year since I used it.  I knew it was in my presentation binder:

Product Presentations

That is my favorite thing about LiveBinders – knowing exactly where to find everything. Even though I have over 250 binders and thousands of links and documents, I still know exactly where to find things.

But I’m interested in what other people think. Tina recently interviewed a teacher who liked LiveBinders because she could take her binders with her if she changed schools. All the materials that she had collected were hers to share and reuse as she pleased.

What is your favorite thing about LiveBinders?

We would also like to know what can we do to make LiveBinders work better for you. We are always incorporating your feedback into LiveBinders. How we can make the product better for you? Post here or send an email to feedback@livebinders.com.

Easy Search by Author Added to LiveBinders

We just put up a new release of LiveBinders. This has fixes for bugs reported by Peter and Andrew including some sites that wouldn’t work with “LiveBinder It” and some IE8 issues. Thank you to both of you for reporting the problems to us!

A new feature added in this release is the ability to click on the author name to do a “search by author”. This lets you click on the author’s name of the binder on the “Featured Binders” shelf and see all the binders by that author. For example, you could click on “xmath” on the binder below to see what other great binders he has created:

More Features for Teachers

Live Link

We had several teachers who requested the ability to open the web page from within the binder – essentially escape the confines of the binder. So now, in play or full screen mode, the link in the binder is a live link. Clicking on that link will take you out of the binder and to that web page.

Live Link in the Binder

Change Email Address

We also had requests to be able to change your email address. You can now do that. To change any information in your profile, just click on the link with your user name in the upper right corner of the LiveBinders page.

Link to Profile

Formatting Clean Up

We also did some formatting clean up. We noticed that teachers were creating some amazingly comprehensive binders with many subtabs like this one:

Teaching Resources

So we just made that look a little better.

Please keep those requests coming! We are thrilled with the response from teachers and want to make sure that LiveBinders works well for you.

Student Goals

Mr. Lester has been busy figuring out new ways to use binders in his teaching. He recently came up with the idea of using private binders for student-parent-teacher communication. A private binder can have the student’s individual goals in a place where everyone can find them. The binder can have websites and materials designed to help that student reach their goals.

We can’t show you examples of these binders because they are private. But here some more of Mr. Lester’s well-organized public binders:

Mr. Lester- 2nd Grade Resources

Mr. Lester- 4th Grade Resources

Mr. Lester- 5th Grade Resources

Binder Dashboard Added

We just added a new dashboard feature to LiveBinders so that you can track the activity on your binders and see when you have new comments.

Also with this release we are still working on the file upload problem. Our apologies for not having this completely working yet. Right now you can upload word documents, but they will open outside of the binder. Uploading pdfs still is not yet working.

We fixed a problem with ‘LiveBinder It’. ‘LiveBinder It’ our bookmarklet, was not working properly when there were special characters in the title of a webpage – so you may have seen some web pages that wouldn’t go into the binder. That is now fixed.

Thank you everyone for your continued feedback!