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Live Binders

After 1/2 a week in the classroom I have pretty good reviews to report about Live Binders.  For those that didn't read my last post about the conference I just attended, I'll give a brief synopsis.  I learned a lot of cool free and some not so free technology apps and programs to use in the classroom.  My goal was to integrate all of these different types of programs into my lesson plans here and there to spice up life a little bit. 

One of the programs I introduced this week is Live Binders.  LB is essentially a virtual 3 ring binder that you can add notes, documents, and websites to.  I wanted to introduce this tool to my students to give them a way to organize their notes, and encourage them to discover new resources for class.    Even better; LB has a free app for the iPad.  Here is a little video from their site:






Here is what I've learned so far:

Some students took to this program like a duck to water.  They were excited to show off their resources and create their binder.  In fact, many of the students created multiple binders so that they had one for their Science Fair projects and other subjects.

Some students... were indifferent.  In fact they weren't really excited about learning about it because they really didn't care about being organized.  They didn't want to discover what they could do and the features in the program... some of the more enthusiastic participants had to show them things to get them rolling and on board with doing something more than just the basics. 

The app itself for LB does have limitations.  For instance we have found that it is difficult to add items sometimes and that you can't delete binders within the app.  Another feature we found lacking was video.  Because iPads do not have flash players you have to get apps to help with flash features.  The LB app doesn't have that flash feature in it, so videos you put into your binder will not be playable through the app.  It really limits the coolest features my students like such as game sites they find that are specific to the math problems we are working on, and their favorite right now is searching out videos of remixed popular music done with math in mind.  (My personal favorite is Mathmeticious... you really gotta check it out)



I digress.. LOL.

Kids really do come up with the greatest stuff!

My students are really excited about Voki so I think what I'm going to do is set up our own class blog/website and introduce the students to it with a Voki... but I'll post on that later.   I hope to be able to add LB's for the kids to take a look at and continue to keep LB's moving.  I'll add updates to see if there have been any changes, and to see if the LB's can be integrated nicely.

Until next time!

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