Bundlenet - Bundle the Web and Send it to Friends

Bundlenut is a simple service for organizing a set of links and sharing them with others. To use the service just visit Bundlenut and start entering the links that you want to include in your bundle. You can include comments about each of the links. When you have added all of links that you want to include in your bundle, Bundlenut will assign a unique url to your bundle. Anyone with access to that url will be able to see all of your links and comments about those links.

You can use the service with or without registering. The advantage of registration is that you can go back and modify your bundle whenever you would like to.

Applications for Education
Bundlenut could be a useful service to use when you want students to read and evaluate a specific set of online resources like primary source documents. Students could also use the service when they are working on collaborative research assignments to share important and useful links with other group members.

Three Tools Students Can Use To Collaboratively Organize Online Research

One of the challenges that I always give to students when they work on collaborative research projects is to "go deeper than you would if you were working alone." The idea that I try to convey to them that the purpose of working together is not to make the assignment easier it is to make it possible for them to discover more information than they would if they were working alone. If the students are researching a topic online, often a series of emails with links to useful materials gets bounced between them. To alleviate the inbox flood, here are three tools that students can use to collaboratively organize their online research.

Diigo is my number one choice for collaborative bookmarking. Students can create groups or you can create groups for them to which they contribute bookmarks. Bookmarks can be annotated with notes about what makes that bookmark useful for the project that the students are working on. My friend Mary Beth Hertz wrote a nice overview of Diigo a couple of years ago, you can read that post here. The video below provides an overview of Diigo's features. 

Diigo V5: Collect and Highlight, Then Remember! from diigobuzz on Vimeo.

Think Binder is a website that gives students a place to create online study groups. In each group students can share files, share links, chat, and draw on a collaborative whiteboard. Students can create and join multiple groups. As you will see in the video below, getting started with Think Binder takes just a minute.
Embedded below is my brief video overview of Think Binder.


Searcheeze is a relatively new and neat service for curating the web with your friends. Searcheeze is basically a social bookmarking service with an extra publishing feature added to it. Here's how it works. Searcheeze provides a bookmarklet for bookmarking the things you find online. When you click the bookmarklet it opens up a sidebar to which you can drag as much highlighted text as you like from the webpage you're viewing. From that sidebar you can specify which of your collections of bookmarks you want send your highlighted content and bookmarks to. Then back in your Searcheeze account you can arrange your content and publish it for others to see. If you want to curate content with other Searcheeze users you can do so by sharing a collection and working together to add to it.

The video below offers a short overview of Searcheeze.

Searcheeze - Search collaboration made easy! from Searcheeze on Vimeo.

Create Study Materials from Evernote Notes

Ever since Google Bookmarks stopped supporting lists last fall, I have used Evernote almost exclusively for all of my bookmarks and notes. Recently, while exploring some the many features of Evernote, I discovered that you can create flashcards from the contents of an Evernote notebook.

StudyBlue, a flashcard service that I covered last week, allows you to pull your notes from Evernote into its service to create flashcards. You can pull in just one notebook from Evernote or pull in multiple notebooks. One you've imported your notebooks you can copy and paste from your any of your notes to create flashcards. If you have images and links you can include those in your flashcards too. Click here or here to get started importing Evernote content into StudyBlue.

Applications for Education
I've said it before and I'll say it again, flashcards are a very basic study method for very basic information. Yet flipping through flashcards remains a popular way for students to review information. By using StudyBlue students can access their review materials from any Internet-connected device. And by using Evernote to record notes, students can access those notes and create flashcards from any Internet-connected device.

Magzinr - Bookmark and Tweet at the Same Time

Magzinr is a new social bookmarking tool developed by Russel Tarr. Magzinr provides a platform through which you can create bookmarks, organize them, and Tweet them on one easy-to-use screen. To use Magzinr sign-in with your Twitter account, install the Magzinr bookmarklet, and start bookmarking. Anytime you click the Magzinr bookmarklet you have the option to tag your bookmark, write a description, and Tweet your bookmark. You don't have to Tweet your bookmark, but it is an option.

Magzinr provides the option to organize your bookmarks in a tree structure. Every tag that you use in your bookmarks has an RSS feed assigned to it. People can subscribe to your tags instead of subscribing to your entire account. You can also embed your set of bookmarks into a webpage through the Magzinr widget. Take a look at Russel's Magzinr page here or view my fledgling account as embedded in the widget below.


Magzinr can be used on an iPad if you follow the directions on the Magzinr homepage.

Applications for Education
One the great benefits of being on Twitter is learning from the plentiful links shared by other educators. A benefit of online bookmarking is that you can access your favorite bookmarks regardless of which computer you're using at the moment. Magzinr combines both of those benefits into one nice, handy package.