There you are hunched over your laptop, which is hooked up the projector, at the front a full classroom, racking your brain to remember the exact title of the You Tube clip you wanted to show. Meanwhile you have 30 impatient students waiting. You type fast, and bring up a list of options that you know aren’t the exact match, but you hope it will do, as you have now wasted 15mins of class time just to show another example of irony. If only there was an easier way? Now there is: Live Binders.
As I continue down the road of the ever changing world of technology, I’m brought back to one of my first experiments in floating on a cloud, so to speak. As mentioned in my previous blog, I have been dabbling in Live Binders, a cloud based program that allows you to locate your teaching resources at the click of a mouse. When first introduced to the idea I was reluctant, as I didn’t understand the whole “cloud” phenomena, and more importantly, why I would ever need it? Though when given more time during a Pro-D day, I thought “why not give it a chance.” So with my laptop and instruction manual in tow, I set forth on a new adventure in the clouds. After an hour I was hooked once again. In almost every English class I show pictures, You Tube clips, and other media from the Internet. Normally I would spend valuable minutes fumbling my way through a search, to find said “clip”, while my students waited. Now I all have to do is bring up my Live Binders and presto: I have my lessons right there.
I soon figured out my goal was to have my physical binders up in the clouds with all my material. This way when my colleagues wanted to borrow my curriculum, I could refer them to the on-line binders, so that my hard cover ones wouldn’t go missing. An experience I never want again. I later realized I could post student work on it, like creative writing examples, to share on Twitter. And just recently I presented Live Binders to the department, where it became apparent we could create a binder for each grade level and everyone could contribute their ideas to it. With so many uses, why don’t you just “Live Binder It”?
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