For those of us who participated in #ISTELive one of the most valuable experiences that we had was the backchannel discussion. We began our discussion during the opening Keynote, but things really swung into action during the sessions on Monday through Wednesday.  Over the course of these three days we became colleagues and friends… a true cohort.  When I talk about my ISTE experience I mention these wonderful educators by name.  We shared a lot! We talked about teaching and technology, choices and challenges, family and friends, travels and home…  We talked about how we were on the ISTE diet (feeding on information forgetting to eat real food), how we hadn’t left our computers for days, how we needed treadmill desks…

…And we shared TONS of resources.  Early on, Adrienne (@adebouch) gave me the tip to use Symbaloo to curate some of the resources that I found and we both began collecting and curating.  Her ISTE Symbaloo was connected to my ISTE Symbaloo and mine to hers, and we both had a link to a shared google doc with Jen’s notes (@JKjennkaiser) from the sessions.  We had several people from our group editing that document as well.

As I said though… we shared  A LOT!  I got to the point that I couldn’t keep up, so I started just opening tabs.  I decided I would go back at the end of each session and add the links to my Symbaloo. I remember looking at my tabs at one point and I had so many open that I could only see one or two letters on each tab.  Thankfully Brandon (@Den_Petersen ), one of the moderators, recommended installing the OneTab add-on.

OneTab is a Chrome/Firefox add-on for website curation.  It is by far, the easiest webpage curation tool I have ever used.  Here’s how it works: Open as many tabs in your browser as you want.  When you get tired of looking at all of those open tabs, click on the OneTab button.  OneTab closes all of the open tab and creates a new webpage with links to all of the tabs that were just closed.  That list can then be named, rearranged, edited, shared, exported or deleted.  The next time you want a new list of tabs closed OneTab will add them on that same page.  You can move links from one list to another.  Check out more features here.

When you share a list you either can share it as a link or use the generated QR code.  Check out my links form the QR code/Augmented Reality Session. 

There are two features that are missing that would improve the functionality.  First, when I share a list, I’d like to be able to see the title of that list (the title that I gave it) on the shared page.  Right now I can’t find it anywhere.  Second, I’d like to be able to annotate the list in OneTab before sharing. My work around for this is to copy and paste the shared list into my blog post or a word document, but life would be just a bit easier it I could annotate the links before sharing.

Saving and sharing links just got amazingly easier for me and my students.  If you’ve ever been frustrated by keeping track of webpages, give OneTab a try.