Putting All Those Resources Together

Wow, the past couple of weeks have flown by. I remember complaining that the weeks weren’t fast enough, now they seem to go by too quickly. Probably what happens when you’re having too much fun right? I am so happy to get my few minutes at home today to snuggle with my dog and get work done and off my todo list before flying out again tomorrow morning .

The buzz word for this week has been “interoperability” you’d be surprised how many times I have heard that word just this week. Relating mostly to technology systems talking to each other like how an app on your phone allows you to share to social media. Those two systems can all speak to each other. You can use them both instead of using one and then using the other to complete one overall activity. Bringing everything into one place making the use of both programs much easier and you get the best of both apps.

It made me think, teachers sort of have to do this everyday even if the resources they use do not talk to each other nicely. They have to pull together so many different things into one place for the overall goal of teaching their students. How can teachers make all the resources they have been given work together to create ultimate opportunities in their classroom? Probably one of the toughest jobs for a teacher is just to put all the information they have into one lesson to make learning awesome and fun.

So where do you go and what do you do to make all those new tools you get neat and organized? Here are my top 3 things

1.) Get a Wikispaces page and drop links to all of your resources onto those pages. You can make the page private to just you or share it with colleagues. You could even make it public so students could go home and access what you used in class.

2.) Dropbox which is an app, a website, and a program you can download that just acts as a storage device and you can access it from anywhere. I had a folder in one that had all my songs for the week, another that held my lessons for the marking period, and another with just resources I acquired to use in class. All in one place and easily accessible!

3.) There is also a handful of cool apps out there that can help organize your resources:

Planbook $5.99 on the App store is a full planning book on your iPad just at the touch of your fingertips. Great way to put in links to resources you want to share during class and then you can show the webpage links right off your iPad.
Goodreader $4.99 is a markup app that is perfect for taking PDFs and TXT files marking them up. You can take all your lesson plans and mark them up with notes for the next time you use them. Also a great app to download PDFs of conference session handout and mark them up right there.
Evernote Free, is the best notes and organizational program I can find. Available on devices and on the computer, you can save articles, write notes, take important pictures, keep your favorite links and search for them all with their simple and powerful search engine, and it syncs to every device you have!. Evernote is the perfect place to put all your resources into one place.
Scanner Pro $2.99 – Make all the paper you have magically disappear into your iPad by just taking a quick picture. Stores all of your paper resources into one place.
iBooks Free- Did you know you can store PDFs in iBooks? How about did you know you can even make your own book filled with resources in iBooks Author? Keep it looking sleek and all in one place with this fantastic app!