March 28, 2012

Last week during our media specialist meeting, one of the district's instructional techs did a presentation on Edmodo and LiveBinders. The district will be offering classes for both of these web tools for teachers and media specialists in the month. Although I had created an account on both of these sites, it was great to see someone else using them and giving tips on them.  During one of Dr. Repman's classes, we were required to sign up with Edmodo and create a post.  It was more just to sample the web site and see what was out there rather than an assignment to use it in the class.

The district has set up a district account on Edmodo for all the teachers and staff to use.  There is a passcode that must be used to be a part of the larger group account.  Evidently, many of the teachers are already using this resource, which I thought was wonderful.  Some of my teachers are also using Edmodo, which is fabulous!!  In addition to the district account, there are individual group accounts that you can be added to. During our meeting all the media specialists were added to the Media Services group. 

The instructional tech also showed us how to sign up for LiveBinders and create a simple binder.  There were also examples on the Edmodo site that she and others had created to help us envision how LiveBinders could be utilized.  I had created an account on this site at the beginning of our practicum when I saw where one of the former grad students had used the site in her portfolio to create the teacher online course.  I didn't play with it much then and thought it was a little confusing.  However, seeing the tech model and use it really got me interested in trying it.  At the end of our meeting, all the media specialist were given an Edmodo/LiveBinder assignment for "homework."  We were to create a LiveBinder and post it to the Media Services Edmodo group.  I basically used the same information I used for my teacher online course using my Destiny tutorials to create my LiveBinder, but instead of embedding the videos, I could only link to the url.  I'm not sure I like using LiveBinder for this purpose, but it would definitely be useful for using various websites links and informational sites for students and teachers.