LiveBinders

www.livebinders.com

A Productivity Tool

Remember punching holes in papers and organzing everything with dividers and tabs into 3-ring binders?  LiveBinders is a Web2.0 tool that helps you organize online web pages into an electronic binder. The tool lets you look at multiple web sites, Word documents, & PDFS within the same 'binder' window, organized by tabs, however you have put them together.  A user can also add a few comments about each tab , allowing the reader some insight into the creator's organization. The tool also provides a bookmarking tool one can install on their web browser so that pages can be bookmarked and added to LiveBinders during routine web searches.   After creating a binder, a link directly to the site can be shared with others. 

Using LiveBinders is great if you have multiple websites and documents that you would like to keep organized for yourself or to share with others.  You should be comfortable navigating the web to use this tool, and have a project in mind that utilizes websites and/or documents (Word/PDF) to be uploaded. Let's give this LiveBinder things a try using examples created in Jing/Screencast...

1. Signing-up for the website is free; just create a unique username and password. The tool does not allow you to sign-in with another web tools log-in.

2. Once you have created a user log-in, the site takes you directly to the LiveBinder creation page:



From this page, you can see that a binder containing instructions for creating your own binder is included.  Click on "Start a Blank Binder" to create your own.

3. Next, enter details to describe and create your binder:



4. Now that a binder is created, tabs can be added.



5.  Now, I want to add more URLs to my binder, but it can be a little time consuming to go back and forth between the LiveBinder site and my other sites, so I'm going to install the bookmarking tool. I have to go back to my LiveBinder dashboard, which is the 1st page that comes under my username, and select "Bookmark Tool," which takes me to a page with instructions. By following the instructions, I've added a "LiveBinder It" button to my IE toolbar. For the next step, I will use my new button.

6.  I've added a few URLs to my LiveBinder, which you will see in a moment.  I'm going to next show you how to use the toolbar button and add a subtab to the maintabs:



7. Next, you can add other types of files to your LiveBinder, including files uploaded from your computer and other types of media on the web:



8. After you have created a binder, there are options for sharing it across the toolbar in your LiveBinder window, which allows you to share your binder through email, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, Purk, or use an embed code to share it on another URL. You can see the PedsNeph I've created here:

PedsNeph

The website for LiveBinder definitely promotes the educational value of this tool.  They have "Featured Binders," many of which are categorized under Education. There are other categories of the binders, including travel, crafts, business, etc. All the public binders can be searched, and LiveBinder features a "Top 10 of 2012" binder section - pretty cool!

Here is a link to view some of those really great project binders: http://www.livebinders.com/shelf/featured
Similar to the binder I've already started, I could definitely see using this tool to create resources for residents and fellow in graduate medical education programs.  To help create a library of resources, teams of residents could work together to create subspecialty binders to use as resources for their program.  It would be a great tool for a subspecialty rotation to use to create links of directions, resources, reading materials, self-assessment quizzes, and feedback tools to help direct trainees working on their rotation for the month. I think this has more ready to implement possibilities than any tool I've reviewed so far.

LiveBinders is great because it is simple and straightforward to use.  Currently, the entire tool is free, and each user has up to 100MB on storage space.  The capability to upload your own files definitely adds to its utility.  A user can add collaborators to their binder, so multiple people can work on the same project. I'm trying to think of some disadvantages of the tool...I think I need to work with adding more different types of files to see if they all upload properly. The limitation of 100MB could be a disadvantage if you really get productive with this tool, and currently a professional or advanced option doesn't seem to be even available for a fee.  If you are trying to organize your URLs or would like to present a batch of URLs to a group, definitely try this out!