Real Binders Drive Me CRAZY!

According to the National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) for Teachers, one of my goals as a teacher is to engage in professional growth and leadership.  As I follow all these RSS feeds about technology, I can't help but feel like I'm constantly engaging in professional growth.  When I see something that interests me, I click on it.  While at times this leads me to dead ends or useless information, I have been finding lots of great information and tools that I can use to help myself professionally.

My last post mentioned LiveBinders, a really useful tool for organizing information that teachers find for each area of their curriculum.  But another thing LiveBinders is great for is their public binders.  People have already created binders on a plethora of topics, and all I have to do is type in what I'm looking for and BAM!  Suddenly there's a binder (or several) waiting for me.  I typed in "Civil War" (which you might have noticed by now tends to be my topic of choice) and there were over 10 binders to look at, many of which had valuable and well-organized information that I could use when I teach that unit

Real binders drive me nuts.  I love technology.

Technologies I Cannot Live Without (So They Say--Whoever They Is...)

Today Google Reader showed me Edudemic's post, The 15 Education Technologies to Know About This Year.  Since it's now my job to keep in the know about these things, I decided to check it out.  There were some technologies that I'm currently aware of or using (Kidblog, StudyBlue, and Glogster) but there were also several other technologies that interested me.

Flashnotes

Flashnotes is a site that allows students to post the notes they take in class and get paid when other people use them!  How amazing is this??  I wish this had been around when I was a student, because I, quite frankly, was an amazing note taker.  Granted, this is not a useful program for my students in particular, but for students at the high school and college levels, this program could be really useful!

Another great technology is LiveBinders.  LiveBinders seems kind of like Diigo, but instead of simply tagging webpages, you can create entire binders dedicated to areas of your curriculum.  These binders can include webpages, videos, pdfs, and other technologies that you can then organize to your liking.  You can also share the binders, so it would be a great way to collaborate with other teachers in your building or district.  This program, like Flashnotes, does not seem like it will be used frequently in the elementary classroom, but if students are doing a large research project, it could come in handy. Click here to watch a video on the usefulness of LiveBinders.

I thought I'd share these technologies even though they might not be appropriate for your elementary classroom.  Despite that, they would be great as teacher tools, and if you visit the Edudemic website, you can see the other technologies that you cannot live without this year.