Our New iPad App

Thanks to feedback from our community, we are proud to announce our first version iPad App!

Our iPad app allows you to stay logged into your account and quickly access your binders and your custom shelves.  The App will launch your binder in play or edit mode in the Safari browser where you can use all of the existing web features.

Please note that the App is compatible with iOS 5.0.1.

We look forward to learning more about how LiveBinders will help you integrate iPads in your classrooms and welcome your feedback and ideas about how you’ve been able to use it for learning.

Please check out our binder below to view screen shots of the App with explanations of how the App works.  We will update it with any further improvements and tips and tricks as we go along.

LiveBinders iPad App

If you find any bugs, please let us know.  We Your feedback is always welcome!

Changes for iPad and Present

We have two small changes to talk about today. The first is for the iPad. Previously you were not able to scroll content in the iPad. We have implemented a short-term fix for this by adding “Less” and “More” buttons at the bottom of the window on the iPad. By clicking on these buttons, you can adjust the vertical size of the content window to view longer pages:

You willl see these buttons only on the iPad

Present Mode
The second item that we added is the link to present mode. We noticed that many of you prefer to send your binders around in present mode. For those of you that don’t know what present mode is, just click on the “P” in the lower right of any binder (an example is included below.) You will see a cleaner version of your binder without the login and sharing information. If you prefer to send your binder around this way, you can now do that by cutting and pasting the “Present URL” from the “Embed” option.
You can get to the embed option either from clicking on the “E” in the lower right inside the binder or from the Options menu on the shelf.


Here is a binder shown in Present Mode:

Some Libraries You Just Have to See

Tina and I are always awestruck at the amazing binders that are assembled by the LiveBinders’ community. I know lots of teachers who search for binders first before trying to create their own lesson plans. I thought I would take a minute to showcase some of the amazing teachers, principals, educational consultants, technology coordinators, and librarians who have created whole libraries of great binders. I’m including twitter ids for the ones that I know so that you can follow them on twitter too. Please comment on any that I have missed!

I have to start with Karen Bolotin @kbkonnected who has over 75 excellent binders. She teaches at the elementary level and provides amazing resources for teachers around the world.

Toby Price is an assistant principal who has a love of Apple products. Check out his Apps for students, parents, teachers, and administrators. He also has great resources on MAPs and Autism. Follow him at @teachersharetp.

Steven Anderson is very well known in the educational technology community, follow him at @web20classroom. An expert on social media in the classroom, his binders on QR codes in Education, An Educator’s Guide to Twitter, Google+ for Educators, and Staying Safe Online are not to be missed!

Michael Fisher owns the distinction of having the most viewed binder on the site – iPads in Schools. A nationally certified teacher and instructional coach, Michael is pushing for great change in education. He has fabulous resources on student-centered learning including. The Digigogical Matrix, Curriculum Transformations, and Social Justice LIVE! are just a few of his excellent binders. Follow him at @fisher100.

Though I’ve never spoken with wisermar and don’t know her twitter name (though I suspect that it may be Mary Wiser @wisemar) I have a deep admiration for the library that she has created which includes a great binder on the U.S. Constitution, lots of US and world history resources, but also fun binders like the Halloween binder that we recently added to the featured page.

Though not as many binders as the others, Justin Stallings’ Library is growing quickly. He has created great social studies binders including one on the 2012 Presidential Election. His other binders focus on natural disasters including Tornadoes, Hurricanes, and Earthquakes. (Hmm, makes me wonder if there is a tie-in between the 2012 election and natural disasters.) Follow him at @justinstallings.

I’m going to mention two great librarians together here, Joquetta Johnson @accordin2jo and Carolyn Jo Starkey @carolynstarkey. Both have created great resources for their schools and resources that librarians around the world have found incredibly useful.

@2sparkley has built a library almost as large as KBConnected. She has many great resources that include both holidays and technology like Presentation Resources, Podcasting, Creative Commons, and Mother’s Day.

Ugh! Two that I forgot from my initial post: Angela Cunningham (@kyteacher). She has created a simply amazing collection of world history and social studies resources! Tia Cooper (@techwithtia) has created some of the best ed-tech resources out there with Winning Webquests, 100+ STEM Websites & Tools for Teachers, and “If It’s Not Free! It’s Not For Me!”.

I just stumbled upon another great author tonight, Shannon Long has put together some really creative binders including Angry Bird in the Classroom and the Cookie Challenge. I couldn’t find a twitter address for Shannon, but here is her blog: http://technologyrocksseriously.blogspot.com/

One more that I forgot about is Tina Holland’s Library. She has built some great science and technology binders and also has her own LiveBinder portfolio.

Ok, I stumbled across another great library tonight, Linda Kellim has also built some great science and technology binders.

Those are just a few, please let me know which great LiveBinders authors that you have found on the site!

A Couple of Changes to the “LiveBinder It” Bookmarklet

We just did a couple of updates to “LiveBinder It” that you may notice the next time you use it. Someone in our LiveBinders community pointed out that if you save a page to a subtab with “LiveBinder It”, we used to remove that part of the menu after it was done saving. This may have left you wondering, “Did I just save that to the right subtab?” We love our LiveBinders community for pointing these things out to us. So we fixed it so that you will see subtab that has your new link:

The second item was something that we noticed on twitter. It seemed that people wanted to post the link that they had just added to their binder. So we added an easy way for you to do that. There is now an option that lets you tweet out both the link and the binder after you use “LiveBinder It” to add something to your binder:

Thank you again to our LiveBinders community for letting us know what we need to work on! You are awesome!

The All-Important Conference Handout

I know that when I speak at conferences that the most common questions are: “Can I have a copy of your slides?” and “Can you provide that url again?”

Conference handouts are a very important part of your presentation. Your talk is often so information rich that it can’t possibly be adequately absorbed in just an hour. People need to digest the information and then go back and review it. They also need reinforcement of your message and they need to explore your sources for themselves so that they experience that “ah hah” moment on their own. Don’t let them do that without you! Create a binder with all your materials and make sure that you provide your blog or website in the binder. This will help you reinforce your message, but also let them remember the source of that message.

LiveBinders is your perfect solution to a great conference give-away! Here is a brief video overview:

But here is the best part, you can be working on your handout until the last possible minute. Of course there are times when I get additional resources from the audience. I love being able to tell them that those resources will be included in the binder. Unlike emailing information, with a binder, everyone always has the latest version.

Here is a great example from Kathy Cassidy and Maria Knee with slides and other resources:

Going Global: Learning Together

Great Video of How to Use New LiveBinders Features

Dean Mantz created a great video on how to use the recently announced features in LiveBinders.

You may also want to check out scling’s binder on embedded all sorts of fun things into a LiveBinder:

A Guide on Embedding Objects and HTML Editor

Visual Subtabs

We love our LiveBinders community! Everyone always has helpful suggestions and ideas on how to improve LiveBinders. This one was requested by many of you. You felt like the subtabs were not visible enough in the binder. We polled a few of the people in our community with some ideas and this was the design that they thought would make the subtabs jump out more.

Please let us know if this works for you. We deeply appreciate your feedback!

New Text Editor in LiveBinders

We are very excited to announce our new text editor in LiveBinders. You can now easily insert links and pictures into the text sections on LiveBinders. This is a quick look, but we will create a tutorial for this soon.

Thank you to everyone who asked for this feature, we appreciate hearing from you!

Create Your Own Binder Collections with Shelves!

We are very pleased to announce this feature since so many of you have requested it!

Now you can create your own shelves to organize, not only your binders, but other people’s binders as well. Here are some reasons that you might want to create shelves:

1. Collaborate with a group on multiple binders
2. Collect the best binders on a given topic
3. Create a separate shelf for your students and one for parents
4. Organize binders by subject (your binders and binders from other authors)

The nice thing is, when those binders are updated, you automatically have the latest version on your shelf. These new shelves can also be embedded, so you can put them in a website, wiki, or blog.

In fact, you don’t have to have your own binders at all, you can just curate all the great binders that are already out there on your shelves.

Our LiveBinders community has shown us some amazing applications and uses for binders. We can’t wait to see what you do with shelves!

Here is how you create and add to your own shelves:

You will notice that your “My Binders” page has changed its name. It is now “My Shelves”.

All your shelves will be located on the drop down menu under “My Shelves”.

To add a binder to a shelf, click on “Add to Shelf” either from the link in the lower left inside the binder or from the “Options” menu on the shelf.

When you click on that link, you will have the option to add that binder to an existing shelf or create a new shelf.

These shelves can be emailed as links or embedded as widgets in your blog or website. This is easier on blogger and other websites, but can be done on WordPress like the example below:

Please see our help menu or video for more details on creating your own shelves.

Here is an example – our shelf of the winners of the “Top 10 LiveBinders for 2011″.

Thanks again to those who requested this feature. As always, keep those enhancement requests coming. We love making LiveBinders a more useful tool for you.

And the winners are…

First, congratulations to all of the 29 LiveBinder entries – out of over 100,000 binders, your binders were selected as a Top 10 Contender and that’s worth mentioning!  And to our Top 10 Favorite LiveBinder winners – double Congratulations are in order!!

For Barbara and I, it was so much fun to see the good sportsmanship carried out on twitter as all of you tried to engage people to participate.  We both had a good laugh when @mfisher1000 decided to take on the 3rd graders in @mthornton’s class. Who thought it would get that heated?

I think the main point to take a way from all of this is how useful your binders have been to people.  In this day and age where the internet is getting overwhelmingly bombarded with information – its nice to have people you trust and respect sort through content in a meaningful way.  We love the polished way in which these binders were carefully created. 

To honor all of the 2011 Top 10 binders, we’ve provided badges for your home pages and mini-badges that will appear next to your binder icons on your shelves and will also appear within your binders. We will email you your website badges shortly and your mini-badges should start showing up on your shelves and binders immediately.  Below are the Top 10 Favorite Binders – Congratulations everyone! 

Tina and Barbara

The LiveBinders community recently nominated and voted for their top ten LiveBinders. Here are the winners:

1. Michael Thornton’s

Student Digital “Textbooks”

2. KB Konnected’s

Amazing Animal Webcams

3. Mike Fisher’s

iPads in Schools

4. Steven Anderson’s

An Educators Guide To Twitter

5. Christopher Stefanski’s

Free Online Resources

6. Michelle Green’s

12 Ways to eLearning

7. Marianne Griffith’s

Art Education ACING

8. Ann Marie Kennedy’s

Fun Math Resources

9. Toby Price’s

MAPS FOR STUDENTS and PARENTS

10. Steven Anderson’s

QR Codes In Education

Vote for Your Favorite LiveBinder

With over 100,000 binders in LiveBinders, we want to make sure everyone sees the really great binders. Thank you for all the nominations! Now you can vote for your favorite LiveBinder here.

Nominations for Your Favorite LiveBinder

Results will be announced at ISTE 2011.

Create a Binder Cover from an Uploaded Image

Thanks to those of you who sent in requests for this feature, you can now create a binder cover by uploading an image into your LiveBinder.

You can upload either .jpgs or .gifs for your binder cover. Simply upload the file into a tab or subtab, then click on “Change Thumbnail” under “Binder Properties” in the “Edit Menu”.

If you know you are going to use the image for a binder cover, you may want to crop before you upload it.

Please remember not to upload any copyrighted files without express permission.

Thanks so much everyone for the feedback!

100,000 View on the iPads in Schools Binder

Michael Fisher’s “iPads in School” Binder is quickly reaching 100,000 views! This is the most views of any binder on the LiveBinders site! In celebration of this milestone, Mike is running a contest for lesson plans to include in the binder.

LiveBinders want to extend a huge CONGRATULATIONS to Mike for creating this amazing resource!

iPads in Schools

8th Graders Take the Lead in Learning

Please join us on Wednesday May 25th at 9:15am pdt, 10:15am mdt, 11:15am cdt, and 12:15pm edt when we will listen to Jason Schrage’s 8th grade class talk about their Cold War project and how they created their own text book for learning.

Click here to go to the Learn Central page for this webinar.