TYPES OF TOOLS
Social Bookmarking: Many of us have been collecting and organizing resources for a long time now using tools like delicious and diigo. Both of these tools let us save links to our favorite web sites, add notes and tags to help describe them and improve findability. They also include a variety of social features that let us share our bookmarked sites with others. Diigo also has collaborative features than can be useful for groups sharing resources. EduCause has a great overview of Social Boomarking. Some would argue that this is simply “collecting” and that may be true. It depends on how much thought you put into your selections and how effectively you organize them.
Digital Curation tools take these ideas further. Digital curation tools encourage you to select articles, photos, videos, tweets, web sites and other online content about a topic or idea and organize them into a coherent collection that you can share with others. Some digital curation tools let the curator add notes to explain context, offer opinions and ask questions. These collections can be great resources for discovering and keeping up with information. And these tools can be very helpful for students gathering resources for research projects and even for presenting a research project. They can gather information, write notes and reflections on the material, share information in groups and all the while, teachers can be following along and participating as needed. Tools in this category include: Scoop.it, Storify and Pinterest. (Some tips on How to Curate Like a Rockstar)
LessonPaths (the new edu version of MentorMob), BlendSpace and Learnist are also interesting curation tools, but with an educational twist. They focus on providing a platform for curators to create learning experiences. After deciding on a topic, you gather resources – tutorials, videos, web pages, readings, etc – that will help your audience learn the topic at hand. Then arrange them in an order that will help the learner progress from one skill level to another. Useful in a flipped classroom type of setting or as reinforcement for skills learned in class.
Content Aggregators: This group of tools takes a different twist on curation. They take the sources you specify and provide you with a selection of materials from those sources. Tools like paper.li scan your Twitter and other social media streams and produce a selection of the most popular articles mentioned by the people you follow. Other tools in this category include Flipboard, news.me and Zite.
USES IN SCHOOLS
Sharing Your Know-How: No one can be an expert on everything, but we all have things that we’re passionate about and perhaps even are experts in. If we create collections of the best resources on those topics and share them, everyone can benefit from our expertise. This is also a great way to share information about what’s going on in the school with parents and other educators.
Digging for Gold: You may not feel like creating collections of resources yet, but you can still benefit from these services. They are gold mines of great material. If you find an expert in an area you’re interested in, then you can follow what they’re curating. In essence they’re filtering out the dreck and sharing just the valuable resources.
Student Use: Students can gather materials for research, create bibliographies, create collections of news articles around a topic, collect graphics for art projects, and so much more.
Essential Skills: Students learn essential skills when curating content: how to search for and evaluate resources, how to organize and create a balanced collection. Check out this excellent handout on Building Link Collections to help students learn these skills. From the article Teaching Kids to Curate Content Collections.