Curation - Thing 16

Here's a new topic - at least for me - allowing students to curate content to enable them to find the most relevant information on a particular topic. Of course, as teachers we need to provide our students with open-ended questions that encourage them to research and look further. As a child, everytime I asked my parents the meaning of a word or wanted to understand something more, they told me to "go look it up" or "find the information in a book"- they said if I wanted to know the answer, I had to find it myself. At the time I thought this was harsh, but today, the same ideals remain - we cannot spoon-feed children - they have to seek and learn to find the best response and follow-up to make sure the information they find is true. As teachers and parents we have to guide students in learning how to curate the abundance of information on the web.

There are some curating sites many of us are already familiar with - Pinterest being a very popular one. This site allow you to choose and curate the information you are most interested in and pinning it to a page. I explored some new curating sites - one being Livebinders which was very interesting. It is basically a virtual notebook. Imagine no more searching for papers for an old math lesson or finding exercises to go with a particular topic. Livebinders allows you to curate all your information in one place - imagine having all the information you need to teach a complete unit and not using a single sheet of paper! You could even bypass Diigo and bookmark specific lesson ideas and websites directly to Livebinders.  I think this site would be very handy for teachers or anyone needing to organize papers. Say au revoir to all those stacks of paper. Click here for the best Livebinders of 2012.

Another site I had a chance to check out was Storify. I get it, but I am not sure I like it. Storify can be used as a digital storyteller and pulls in information from many social bookmarking sites. You drag the information you deem most relevant and pop it in to the sidebar. When finished, hit publish and you have created a digital story. One can add sentences to each social bookmarking item you choose. The reason I didn't like it as I thought Storify would put everything together as a mini video. You will need to click on each link to view each part of the story. Done this way, the story still seemed a bit choppy, but maybe I am not just seeing it correctly. I played around with Storify for a bit and created a short story on Life in Paris.



In any case, have a look at some of these Curation Tools and let me know what you think.