Teachers as Curators of Learning. Quick: Name ten excellent Web sites related to the grade level or subject area you teach.
Scott McLeod, coordinator of the educational-administration program at Iowa State University, recently posed that question on his blog, Dangerously Irrelevant. Many of the comments his readers left echo McLeod's assertion that the Internet delivers "a paucity of high-quality online resources for educators. " McLeod and others don't deny the abundance of online resources teachers have at their fingertips. The challenge is sifting through all that stuff to find what you need -- and then knowing how to incorporate the gems into your curriculum. Teacher Dan Meyer compares the modern educator's quest to mining: He argues that only a small fraction of the country's three million teachers "have come back from those Internet hills with gold, looking haggard from the extra hours they put in beating these disparate resources into some kind of instructional shape. " He should know. Dis(Pin)terested and accelerating postliteracy. In a largely futile attempt to come up to speed on some of the more recent technology tools and applications that seem to be getting a lot of buzz*, I've been playing with Pinterest.
According to a study by Experian Marketing Services (Liz Gannes, All Things D, August 27, 2012): “Pinterest is now the third most-visited social network, Google+ is No. 4, and Instagram is No. 11, in the markets Experian measures — which are North America, Australia, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Singapore and the U.K.” “As a portion of North American social networking visits, Pinterest grew 5,124 percent and Instagram grew 17,319 percent between July 2011 and July 2012.” While it seems to be that the tool is mainly used by hobbyists, Pinterest has gotten quite a bit of attention from librarians as a recommended tool for "curation" of information by staff and students. When I asked the secretaries in my office about Pinterest, they all were enthusiastic about it for things like recipes and such. How Can Web 2.0 Curation Tools Be Used in the Classroom? Digital Tools Jeff Thomas “Curation” may be one of the big buzzwords of 2011.
As the amount of information accumulates thanks to the Web, it becomes increasingly important that we use tools to help us find information that’s relevant and useful. The role of the curator has always been to help pull together and oversee collections of materials. But just as Web 2.0 has expanded the traditional role of publisher to almost anyone, the role of curator now too is changing. There are a number of tools that enable this. “Curation offers a context on the biggest learning playground the world has ever known.” That’s another vital part of the act of curation: what other people have deemed important. While the Web has perhaps democratized who can be an expert, we do still prefer to turn to those with specific backgrounds and from specific professions, especially when it comes to education.One interesting new curation tool is Scoop.it. Related Explore: Scoop.it.