Live Binders

Back when I was in the classroom, I had binder after binder of training materials on bookshelves.  Usually, they were nothing more than dust collectors.  We would receive the binders during a training and then they would live on a shelf rarely to be touched again.

Now that my job is to train teachers, and knowing what happens to training binders, I went in search of a way to put my materials in a more accessible space.  A few years ago I learned about Live Binders.

Simply put, Live Binders  in an online 3 ring binder.  It's a free way to store your documents, and as the owner, you can choose to make them public or private.  You can also import documents or links from other people's binders into your binder.

I've since created several binders, but I particularly like the shelves they introduced last year.  So far I'm up to 5 shelves, and I use those shelves to "borrow" binders from other folks who have generously shared their binders.

Live Binders can also be used as an ePortfolio, a place to store documents for your substitute teacher, and storing parent newsletters, forms, and other documents.  Adminstrators can use the tool to create an interactive, real-time staff handbook.

Live Binders has apps available for Android and iOS, a bookmarklet tool that easily allows you to capture a web page to your binders, and, for you Chrome users, there's even a Chrome app.

Live Binders is free, but like most web tools now has a paid option.  The free version will give you 100 MB of storage space.  So far I haven't come close to filling that up.  Below are the price comparisons for the Educational users.