Kim’s Ventures in Educational Technology

Recently I was made aware of ShareTabs and wanted to share this unique resource with you. Ever since I discovered the website I have been a devout fan! ShareTabs.com is a great way to share a list of resources and is incredibly convenient. I could see it having great potential for use in the classroom. Instead of creating hotlists of resources and uploading the document to a shared server or online storage site, you can enter the sites and create a sharetab of the resources.

With ShareTabs you can create a very powerful list of resources. As shown on the ShareTabs site ,

ShareTabs – The easy way to share your links as tabs

Add a list of links to the form below and submit it to get a single link to them all, conveniently displayed in tabs. Great for sharing in Email, IM, Twitter, or SMS.

In my last post I shared with you that Peggy George were co-hosting a weekly broadcast on Saturdays called “Classroom 2.o LIVE!” show.  The topic for our first show was personal learning networks and the need for a PLN. If you missed the live show you can listen to and read the chat in the show archive. For reference during the show and for listeners to use as a tool to follow up after the show I created a sharetabs of our PLN resources. I used the name and topic of the show as the name for the URL: http://live.classroom20.com/show-archive.html. You can also click on the image to the left to view the ShareTabs page I created.

To create a ShareTab, enter the list of URLs for the resources you want to show on the preview page of the ShareTab. The ShareTabs website compiles all of the websites and shows a thumbnail of each website with its accompanying URL underneath the thumbnail. In addition to the thumbnail images, a tab at the top of the page is created for each URL. Arrows are located on the far left and right of the tabs so that you can access tabs that may not be currently visible.

If you were using ShareTabs with students you could create a URL that was easy for the students to remember to access resources that were bookmarked for a specific project or assignment. This is especially useful if you deal with time constraints, younger students or need to minimize the time used searching for resources. In my experience working with elementary students, it can be time consuming to have students search for a topic on Google and determine if the site is a valid resource or not. Using ShareTabs can eliminate that and maximize the time students spend working on the computer.