Livebinders

Livebinders.com is an education site that allows users to organize online information much as they would with a real 3-ring binder. When a social studies teacher or student is doing research a project oftentimes they use many different online sources, which can be a hassle to remember and organize. When I'm in this situation and need to remember links I usually just save them to my favorites bar. Livebinders is a much more efficient way of doing this. I think this particular Livebinder does a good job of showing off this feature. The author has taken information about Civil War biographies from many different online sources and combined them all together in a very organized way. I think this would be especially useful for teachers who are doing online research and find a statistic or a brief quote they'd like to remember for a lecture. With Livebinders you could save the page you like, sort it with others of the same category, and have it easily on hand forever. There's actually a nifty program associated with the site that allows you to save a bookmarked page directly to your binder without you having to visit the site.

On the other hand, it seems to me that any Livebinders site requires a large investment of time. It takes quite a while just to learn the basics of creating a site;  Livebinders does provide a detailed tutorial, but the fact that a detailed tutorial is required shows that building a new site isn't simple.

Livebinders is marketed as a presentation tool, but I don't think it does very well in this regard. There's no way to get the buttons at the top of presentation to vanish, which distracts from the images and text on the slide. As far as I can tell there aren't many advantages to using Livebinders for presentations rather than good old fashioned PowerPoint. One positive thing that can be said is that it's much easier to link to screen shots of web pages, although I haven't seen many presentations that use screenshots of webpages....

Livebinders also works pretty well as a way to assign online worksheets. Here's an example. I think Livebinders actually outdoes Moodle here in that images can easily be posted on the page and the user generally has more freedom in designing questions.

So, to recap the advantages of Livebinders:
1. A handy way to store online sources
2. Good for online worksheets

and disadvantages:
1. Not the best tool for presentations
2. Can be difficult getting started

Classroom Uses

I've always liked doing online worksheets (it's impossible for me to lose them) and I think Livebinders is as good as any other site at creating them. I also think the site would be helpful if your class was working on a large research paper that required students to cite many different sources. You could have students do the essay on Livebinders and integrate video and pictures into the text, or just have them store their sources there. It's also a really great way to post reading material to your classroom. One of the things I've always wanted to do in an upper level history class is have students write a persuasive essay on say, the merits of dropping the two atomic bombs on Japan, after giving them a huge number of primary and secondary sources to shift through. In my head I'd always imagined posting the sources on Moodle, although it would make much sense to post them on Livebinders, as it would take much less time to load up each new page.In my theology class my professor posts scanned pdfs on moodle all the time and it takes a little while to boot them up; everything would be much fast on Livebinders.

Issues

As far as I can tell, there are no possible issues here regarding inapproriate content or privacy. All the information within the binders is user generated and Livebinders give its users the option to make their sites accessible only to friends if they desire. Teaching middle school students to easily use the site may be difficult; if things go wrong  it could take an entire class period just to teach students how to get started. Just having the students follow the site's instructions probably would not be sufficient and teachers should be ready to quickly and simply explain how to register and start creating tabs.