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Professional PD Libraries with Pocket

As a teacher, there are apps that make my life easier and that I absolutely love using. One that I discovered recently deserves its own post because it's about to make teachers' lives so much easier.

Pocket is a new FREE app that I just discovered this month when browsing the Education section of the app store. I just finished teaching myself how to use it. After you download Pocket, you create an account  and enable the pocket extension. You can sign up through your Google account. And if you don't already have a Google account, you should. I enabled Pocket on my iPad, phone and laptop. When I went to my Safari browser, I pressed the upload/save button, found Pocket and then enabled it. Now, whenever I find an article on my iPad that I want to save, I can just download it directly.
My library in Pocket so far--these are all links I've saved on
Facebook the past three years. I didn't include irrelevant ones.
On my computer, I enabled Pocket by adding it to my URL bar. I say URL bar because the Pocket icon is right next to my URL. Whenever I find an article, I can download it directly to my Pocket.

I love this app for many reasons. First off, I'm always saving education and unrelated articles/videos/photos in my personal Facebook account. I maintain not only a personal Facebook page, but also a teaching blog and personal business page, so I'm always logged on and browsing when I have a free moment. Now, I can just save any education related articles to my Pocket and have a mini professional development library of ideas and resources. Same with Twitter. I'm always liking articles that members of my PLN post, so now I can easily save these to my pocket for easy future reference.

Second reason I love Pocket--you can follow other people and see things that they are saving! Perfect for learning from other educators and establishing a community.  Through connecting to your Twitter and Facebook accounts, the app also creates a list of recommended articles for you, as well as your own personal library. 

I am so excited to use this app to create a library of articles about teaching. Perfect for easy consulting since everything is in one place. I no longer have to search through emails, my Twitter likes and Retweets and Facebook saved links for articles. 

-Elle 

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