Tag Archives: Netvibes

LiveBinders

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Livebinders is a free site and bills itself as ‘The knowledge sharing place’.  It is a type of online binder where a number of websites can be ‘put inside’ the binder as a collection. Two great examples of use would be as an ePortfolio of websites that you have developed (blogs, wikis, netvibes, etc.) and as a repository for students’ school assignments, whether it be as a bibliography of sites uses or sites the students have developed themselves during their school career.

Livebinders

From the learn more section of the website comes the following information:

A better way to share multiple links quickly and simply

Take Control of Your Information

  • View links like pages in a book instead of URLs on a page
  • Combine PDFs and Word docs with the links you collect
  • Organize your links and documents into tabs and subtabs

Save Time

  • Conveniently update information without having to resend links
  • Avoid the hassle of finding links in old emails and long bookmark lists
  • Update LiveBinders from one place

Share with Pride

  • Build a library of livebinders
  • Allow others to view your public and private binders
  • Embed livebinders on blogs, web pages and desktops

LiveBinders is Free!

  • Sign Up to create an account so you can store your livebinders right away
  • Add the ‘LiveBinder It’ Bookmark Tool to your browser toolbar
  • Start browsing the web. Find a link you want to save then click on the ‘LiveBinder It’ to automatically add the link to a new livebinder

It is easy to add a LiveBinders button to your browser and each time you’d like to save a site, just click on ‘links’, then ‘add to LiveBinders.’ Here is a LiveBinder that I created earlier:

 

 (One LiveBinders is open, click on each tab to open each website.)

As you can see, LiveBinders can be embedded into blogs, wikis and the like.

Be aware that students need to be 13 years or older to sign up for a LiveBinders account.

Best Australian library blogs, wikis, etc.

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We are on the hunt for Australia’s favourite school library blogs, wikis, netvibes, webquests and pageflakes (and so on). We’d also like to seek out blogs by library staff that are reflective of of our profession.

Please consider nominating your colleagues, people from your networks and virtual networks or even yourself. Once we have a shortlist representing different platforms, voting will be open to anyone interested.

Please send information such as:

  • Your name and school
  • Who you are nominating (if known)
  • The name of the website/s
  • The URL/s
  • Any other information

You can nominate as many different websites as you like. Nominations will close on 11 August. Voting will commence shortly afterwards. Please send nominations to brightideas@slav.schools.net.au

Two Web 2.0 presentations

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Recently Donna DesRoches, a Learning Resources Consultant from the Living Sky School Division in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, Canada shared two of her presentations with the International Association of School Librarianship (IASL). Donna has agreed to share her presentations with us here at SLAV’s Bright Ideas as well.

Selection 2.0: Using RSS to enhance print, multimedia and web-based resource selection

(Description) RSS, a web-based application that allows the training of information to come to us, can be used to carry-out the professional selection responsibilities of teacher-librarians. This workshop will explain RSS, demonstrate a variety of formats for organizing incoming information and provide a number of sources for print, multimedia and web-based resources.

http://www.netvibes.com/donnadesroches#General

In this session I showed teacher-librarians how to use delicious feeds to create updated lists of resources for teachers and students. I suggested using NetVibes and using the private pages as the ‘messy’ pages where the feeds from things such as book blogs, and other tools with RSS feeds e.g. CM, Open Culture, Librarians’ Internet Index and Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day – much like the pile of selection tools that ends up on our desks.

As teachers find sites that meet the learning needs of their staff and students they add them to their delicious account tagging them appropriately. The feeds for the specific delicious tags are added to their NetVibes public pages resulting in a collection that could look like this….

Using Emerging Technologies to Build a Personal Learning Network

(Description) Teacher-librarians are specialists with unique learning needs that are not always met through school or division-based professional development. This workshop will provide teacher-librarians with the tools and the knowledge to create networks that will lessen the isolation and provide global connections that will enhance their own learning and benefit the teachers and students with whom they work.

My slide show and supporting links can be found at http://teacherlibrarian20.wikispaces.com/pln

If you have questions about the presentations – please contact Donna.

Thanks to Donna for sharing her presentations with us here in Australia.

Netvibes @ Preston Girls’ Secondary College

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On discovering Netvibes as a result of a previous Bright Ideas post, Preston Girls’ Secondary College teacher librarians Judith Way and Reina Phung couldn’t wait to use it as a resource for students and staff.

Judith says, ‘We had been looking for a Web 2.0 tool where I could incorporate all of the other things we had developed. We needed a central location for all of our blogs, wikis and our Flickr and Delicious accounts. Although Delicious allows us to link sites and describe them, Netvibes gives us the option to incorporate each blog, wiki and other site into our Netvibes homepage. (We also had a problem with our ISP blocking Delicious. This has been an ongoing problem for some months and our IT technician has been liaising with our ISP, but at this moment, to no avail.)’

She explains, ‘Once the blogs, wikis, etc. have been linked to the Netvibes page, the actual sites appear within the page. You can set the size of each “mini page”. Students and staff can then enter their chosen site directly, without a need to click a link or open a new page.’

Judith continues, ‘Netvibes also enables us to dedicate pages for staff and pages for students. We intend to use the widget function to add a calendar so students can see when the Readers Cup is scheduled, when Book Club is due in and when Book Week occurs. Our Netvibes page is linked from our intranet and we plan to promote it by encouraging students to explore it during library orienation sessions, by making and distributing bookmarks with the URL and by introducing Netvibes at a staff meeting.’

Judith also says she found Netvibes relatively quick and easy to use and has even been complemented by the school’s IT technician on her work!

Netvibes can also be used as an RSS reader, so those people using Bloglines, Google Reader or other RSS services may decide to use Netvibes instead. Your RSS feeds can be set as ‘private’ allowing only you to access them.

We look forward to hearing how the staff and students at Preston Girls’ use the site and their thoughts on it.

Netvibes

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Originally this post was going to be about Pageflakes, the Web 2.0 tool that enables users to create their own homepage without the need for HTML or any other specialist knowledge. But some time ago, this post by Michael Stephens came to my attention. It is certainly worth a read and warns what could become of all of the work we invest in particular Web 2.0 tools; we need some kind of backup. So on the back of what Dublin City Public Libraries have developed via the main alternative, Netvibes, here is some more information.

Netvibes is a tool that allows you create your own library (or other) homepage to bring all of your web resources to one place. So if as a school library you have a blog, some wikis, delicious, flickr  and so on, you are able to have them all sited on your Netvibes page.

Your own Netvibes page is as easy to set up as a blog or wiki. Netvibes have a setup wizard that asks what type of theme you’d like to use, your location, your (or your school’s) interests, the widgets you want and you have your page! Here is what the Dublin City Public Libraries’ page looks like:

If you don’t like the choices that Netvibes has made for you, you can easily delete them and add others. If you have setup your own blog or wiki, then you can make your own Netvibes page in a matter of minutes. Don’t forget to ask your IT staff to link your Netvibes page to the Intranet, do some publicity and away you go. Good luck! If you do decide to create a Netvibes or Pageflakes page for your library or you already have one, please consider submitting it to Bright Ideas so that we can feature it.