What is Content Curation?
Content curation is process of finding, organizing, and sharing digital content. The best part is that you do not have to generate your own content to be a great curator.
Content Curation Primer Content curation is not about collecting links or being an information pack rat, it is more about putting them into a context with organization, annotation, and presentation.
Why is it important to education?
Understanding Content Curation Why curate? What is the value of curating for teachers? Really –what is the benefit of curating in terms of the learning goals – enduring understandings and 21st century skills for our students?
10 Key Reasons Curation Will Transform Education Content curation will play a major role both in the way we “teach” and in the way we educate ourselves on any topic. When and where it will be adopted, it will deeply affect many key aspects of the educational ecosystem.
Principles of Content Curation
Focus What is the point? What should my audience expect to find in my collection?
- Develop an editorial “voice” – don’t be afraid to be choosy about what you post to your collection.
Connect Where do I get my content? Where I am going to host my collection?
- There are numerous social media applications suited to hosting a content collection, explore the options for what best works for you and your goals. There is no single “best” solution.
Engage Is my collection fun/interesting/useful?
- Collect content from a wide range of sources.
- Include both print and video resources.
- Post content that is both accessible for entry level learners and challenging for proficient learners.
Organize Does it look good? Is it easy to navigate the content?
- Spend time cleaning up links, descriptive text, thumbnail images, etc.
- Tagging is crucial to organize the content.
- 3-5 tags per post.
- Use tags to create a clearly defined organizational structure in collection, rather than just randomly create tags for each post.
- Let tags develop organically based on the content in the collection. This is an active process that takes time and reflection.
- Periodically revisit your tag structure to determine if is still effective for navigating your collection.
Share Who is my target audience? How can I best reach them?
- This is similar to collecting. Explore the options and pick what works best for you and your goals.
Be a good neighbor! Am I acting like a member of a community?
- No spamming – Be selective about how often you post links to your collection on other social media.
- Don’t always talk about work – Be sure to share and discuss content and topics that are NOT in your curated collection.
- Make someone else look good – Be sure to give credit to the authors for content in your collection.
Content Curation Tools
Scoop.it lets you express you unique perspective on topics that matter through idea discovery, content curation, and social sharing.
Scoop.it YouTube Channel (VIDEO)
Scoop.it Tutorial (VIDEO) – Demonstration on how to use the Scoop.it dashboard, explore the Scoop.it community, and use the Google Chrome extension.
David Walp’s Scoop.it – Social Studies – 800+ links and videos for Ancient and Western Civilization social studies.
David Walp’s Scoop.it – Teaching Technology – Resources for technology integration, pedagogy, assessment, and professional development.
Learni.st makes it super easy to share what you know by curating the web. You can use videos, blogs, books, docs, images or anything on the web to explain how to learn about a topic.
How Learni.st Works (VIDEO) – This short video will teach you about the basics of Learnist like how the homepage is laid out and what is on a Learn Board.
10 Learni.st Boards for Teachers – These Learnist boards celebrate the teachers using Learnist to help other teachers make school a better place.
EduClipper Clip anything. Share everything.
How to clip and create clipboards on EduClipper (VIDEO) – This screencast talks about how you can search, clip, and create a new clipboard on the web tool educlipper!
Pinterest is a tool for collecting and organizing the things that you love.
Pinterest for Teachers (VIDEO) – Short video tutorial on pinning for teachers.
Educators Guide to Using Pinterest – Pinterest is a great content curation tool for teachers. The ability to pin together images, links, and videos into visually appealing boards makes information sharing way exciting. Teachers can create resource boards for themselves or their students and start sharing with each other.
Symbaloo is the easiest start on the internet. Discover pages with the best links about a subject; Create your own pages with favorites; Share your page with the rest of the world.
Introduction to Symbaloo (VIDEO) – This is a quick introduction to using the web-based favorites graphic interface, Symbaloo.
11 Ways to use Symbaloo for Teachers – Collection of creative ways to use Symbaloo inside and outside of the classroom
LiveBinders is your 3-ring binder for the web, create an online binder for content curation.
LiveBinders Tutorial (VIDEO) – Official LiveBinder tutorial video collection.
Top 10 Educational LiveBinders – Here is a list of the top ten educational LiveBinders for 2012 which has been recently released by LiveBinder.
10 Great Ways that Educators are Using LiveBinders – Great tips from the LiveBinder blog.
Wikis
Wikis in the Classroom (VIDEO) – Award winning teacher, Vicki Davis, demonstrates how she uses wikis to teach. It outlines the 7 pedagogical uses of wikis and also gives information on what a wiki is and how to use it.
Wikipedia Education Program – The idea is simple: Professors around the world assign their students to contribute to Wikipedia for class assignments.
Delicious allows you to discover, collect, and showcase your passions.
Delicious Tutorial (VIDEO) – Learn how to use Delicious to keep up with all your teaching resources.
Diigo is a powerful research tool and knowledge-sharing community.
Diigo Tutorial (VIDEO) – How to use Diigo to create social bookmarks, both as a personal research aid and as a way to share those bookmarks with others.
Best 6 Diigo Groups for Teachers – Here is a list of some of the best Diigo groups where you can meet other teachers and educators from all around the world and develop your personal learning networks.