Thing 6: Curation Tools

There is so much information on the Internet that sometimes it becomes too much and I don't even know where to start. As a teacher I am constantly looking for new content and sources that my students can use and most of the time I spend endless hours trying to find and sift through all of the information. I never realized that I was actually doing "digital curation". I found this topic to be really interesting and there was only one tool, Pinterest, that I was familiar with. I use Pinterest not only in my personal life but for teaching as well. Sometimes I spend more time then I should clicking through and exploring, but I always seem to find the best stuff whether it be a new hair product, a paint color to use in my home, or a really cool lesson. While planning my wedding I used it all the time and it was great when I could send my boards to the florist and photographer to show them what I wanted instead of trying to explain it. I never thought of Pinterest as a curation tool but now that I think about it, it makes perfect sense! The article "16 Ways Educators Use Pinterest" shared some great ideas one of which I would try with my students which is creating resource boards and maybe even creating boards for books they want in the library.

Each year with my 5th graders I teach them how to search for information, and how to determine whether that information is good information or not. I enjoyed the handout "Building Link Collections" and the article "Teaching Kids to Curate Content Collections" was a great read. I explored Delicious and Diggo and in my opinion Diggo had more to offer.  I liked that it had a lot of features that could be utilized and it offers ways to share you information and also keep things private which is good for an elementary school teacher working with younger kids. The site was really user friendly and I liked that, and I also liked that there was a blog I could follow. It is definitely a website that if I used with my students I would have to walk them through how to use it.