Thing 5: Curation Tools

Thing 5:  Curation Tools

I read the article Curation by Joyce Kasman Valenza.  She gives an excellent argument for the necessity of curation and that school librarians already possess the tools be effective curators for digital and print sources.  I appreciated her statement, "They are talented at scouting, identifying relevance, evaluating, classifying, organizing, and presenting aggregated content for a targeted audience."  She points out that librarians can curate for faculty, administrations, students, and parents.  When I was reading this article, I was already thinking of ways to curate digital sources for my teachers and students, but I had not thought about how curating for parents.  This is a great idea and one that I am definitely going to work on in the future.  It will be a great way to share sources and online tools with the parents in our district.

I also read Content Curation:  Tools and Strategies for Teachers by Monica Fuglei.  The main point that struck me with this article was, "curating content is an essential skill to share with students."  Once again I was thinking of the benefits of the librarian curating for teachers and students.  I had not thought of the benefits of having the students curate.  The author lays out a great argument for the value of students as curators.  She states that it is important for students to learn to filter and organize information, so that the amount of information is not overwhelming.  Utilizing the skills of filtering and organizing will also make it easier for students to make connections among different sources and pieces of information.  The author also emphasized the importance of modeling the process of curation and the tools used in curation.

My favorite reading was In School Libraries, Differential through Curation by Rebecca S. Morris.  I am always trying to find ways to differentiate my teaching to meet the needs of all my learners.  I find this particularly challenging when I only have 20 minutes of teaching time per class.  This was much easier to accomplish when I was a classroom teacher.  The author emphasizes that curation of articles, images, websites, etc. will allow for differentiation of instruction needed for diverse learners.  Done well, it can meet multiple reading levels and can provide varied instructional support. A quote that has stuck with me from this article is, "curated collections are uniquely created with intention and purpose."

In addition to the above articles, I did enjoy the Infographic, Content Curation Done Right by Heather Lister and the EdTechChat: Student and Teacher Curation by Caroline VanderArk.

I decided I would like to try one of the learning playlist tools.  I ended up trying all three. Learnist was the first one that I attempted.  I feel a little silly because I could not figure out how to use it and I could not find a Help feature.  Next I tried BlendSpace.  I had a bit more success with this tool, but I could not figure out how to add articles from our online databases and encyclopedias.  I have spent a great deal of time getting my students to use our online databases, so I would definitely want them included in creating a learning playlist.  The other difficulty I had with this tool, was that when I would put in my search term and get a list of results, the results did not seem to have any reading level or grade levels attached.  This seems like a tool that a person would need a great deal of time to be able to utilize it in an effective manner.  Lastly, I tried Lesson Paths.  I did like this tool the best of the three.  It seemed a bit more user friendly as far as figuring out how it works.  I created a quick learning playlist about hurricanes.  I was able to add links to articles from our online tools and databases.  I did send you an invite to view this, but you probably won't see much without our library login information.  I have two questions regarding this tool.  First, I wanted to change the order of the sources in the list, but could not figure out how to do this.  Second, when I first started with the tool, I thought I saw a way to create a class, but once in the tool I could not get back to that feature.  Overall I liked this tool and would definitely use it to create a learning playlist for students if I was a classroom teacher.  I do not think I would use it in this way as a librarian because it feeds the articles to the students, rather than having them find the articles themselves.  I do think that I would like the students to use this tool to curate their own sources for a research project.  I'm wondering if this would work well with my sixth graders.

I have some colleagues who use Symbaloo, so I thought that I would like to give that a try.  I decided to create one for myself that includes all the technology tools that I would like to try or have tried and wanted to remember.

Symbaloo is very easy to use.  I love this tool!  I feel like I have a very easy to access and organized curation of the digital tools that I would like to try.  I think that I will definitely use this tool with my faculty and students.  Here is a link below to my Tech Tools Symbaloo.

Tech Tools Symbaloo

My standard question, are there any curation tools for student use that do not require an email to use?
Thanks!

Thing 3: Online Communities & Personal Learning Networks

Thing 3:  Online Communities & Personal Learning Networks

Twitter is very new to me and somewhat intimidating.  I was planning on doing Option 1:  Note ready to join Twitter?  Then simply explore instead.  Then a couple of weeks ago I was talking with one of my principals and he asked me to send him a link to the library book fair, so that he could send it out on Twitter.  I then said to him that I was currently working on a module for my online class that involved using Twitter.  He told me that he uses Twitter a lot, that it is a great way for instant professional development.  Then he told me to search for his Twitter account and he would make it so that I could follow his list for professional development sources.  Therefore, I now feel obligated to do Option 2:  I'm ready to join!, so that I do not disappoint my principal.  Those administrators are
always great to push us out of our comfort zones to be better educators!!! :)

I now have a Twitter account and I have used it to explore tlchat, edchat, and slscooltools.  All of these are great!  I especially enjoyed tlchat.  Just going through quickly, I found great information on makerspaces, book lists, ebooks, etc.  Immediately, I found two quick ideas that I will use in the next month in my library.  My question is this, is there a way to bookmark(used this term, but not quite sure if it is the correct term) a great tweet that I find, so that it is easy to go back to it later?

I did begin following my principal, Joyce Valenza, and Library Girl.  They all look like they have interesting tweets and good information.  I know that I can't "follow" tlchat, but is there a way to once again bookmark it somewhere on my Twitter homepage?  I am afraid that I won't remember the name of it, if it is not noted somewhere on the page.  Also, already I have a few friends and family following me.  I really want to use this as a professional tool, not a personal social tool.  Is there a way to make this happen?