Overwhelming students with countless resources is probably the worst thing educators can do. Thus, it is important that we carefully curate resources for our students. In other words, create a simple, relevant resource list that is both easy to read and focused. Jennifer Gonzalez, who writes the dynamic blog, Cult of Pedagogy said it best when she described the art of curation as not just being “…about saying “here”. It’s about saying “here is what this is, and here is why it is relevant and interesting.”
There are a lot of tools out there to help us with this: Symbaloo, Pinterest, Wakelet, and Padlet are some examples! Here is an example of a well curated student resource list using Wakelet’s embed feature: Career Exploration Resources
- What are your favorite curation tools to use with learners?
- What kind of resources or content are you curating for your students?
Source: https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/curation/
Comments
I like how Jennifer emphasizes the importance of providing context (what & why) when curating. There's also the element of choosiness. I always think of an art curator. They have to first be selective about what art to include. Then, they organize it, contextualize it, and present it in a way that others can effortlessly appreciate it.
Similar to education, we have to choose resources that are high-quality and meaningful, and, as Jennifer points out, share them in an easily accessible and understandable way.
In my work with the CrowdED Learning initiative, we grapple with this often as we're working with free and open education resources. How do we...
One stride we've made in this area is the development of an OER Evaluation Guide, which a lot of educators weighed in on and helped us develop in our last Maker Space.
The Digital Skills Library was a huge collaborative effort to organize all of the great resources out there for building digital literacy. Soon, SkillBlox will have resources in math, digital literacy, health literacy, civics, workforce prep, and financial literacy nicely organized and available for easy searching and curating.
Hi, new features in SkillBlox!!! We're excited that the "add a note" feature will enable teachers to give more context to the links they're sharing.
And, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, SkillBlox is going to help teachers with this too! No login is necessary for learners to view a really clean playlist (no ads, no mess) of learning activities.
Thanks for a great chat as always, Ashly. I've highlighted some work we've done around curation but there's still so much to be done, of course! Really excited to hear about other perspectives and ideas in this thread...