Creating and publishing a collaborative ebook Librarian Karin Hallett takes us through the step-by-step process her students went through to create history ebooks. Karin Schreier Hallett has been a librarian for 15 years, most recently as School Librarian and Instructional Coach at the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School in Jacksonville, Florida. She is a keen user of Book Creator and has used the app within her classroom for several successful projects, publishing students’ work on her blog Liquid Literacy. About the project My 4th and 5th grade students finished creating ebooks on Fort Caroline, the first French settlement attempt in the New World, and the Lost Colony of Roanoke, respectively. Step 1. Drawing on their subject knowledge, students began by brainstorming possible chapter topics and then putting them in an order. Step 2. Once topics were distributed, students began the pre-writing stage by selecting relevant websites, reading the information, and taking notes to organise their ideas. Step 3. Step 4. Step 5. Step 6. Reflection
Pearltrees - Collect & Share Pearltrees lets you organize everything effortlessly. Add your content, transform it with Pearltrees AI, and organize it into beautiful collections. Discover and share millions of resources on your favorite topics. With Pearltrees, access all your interests anytime, anywhere! Dedicated versions of Pearltrees also exist for schools and enterprises. What people are saying about Pearltrees:"The most elegant and visual way of collecting and sharing online content" The Next Web"Pearltrees puts a library in your pocket" Digital Trends"This app makes a wonderful experience navigating the collections" Forbes Pearltrees is free to download and use. Our Terms of Use: Privacy Policy:
Content Curation Primer Photo by Stuck in Customs What is Content Curation? Content curation is the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme. The work involves sifting, sorting, arranging, and publishing information. 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. People and organizations are now making and sharing media and content all over the social web. Content Curation Provides Value from the Inside Out What does that mean for nonprofits and the people who work for them? For some staff members, content curation can be professional of learning. The biggest challenge to becoming a content curator is getting past the feeling of “content fried” or so much good content and so little time to digest it. The Three S’s of Content Curation: Seek, Sense, Share Getting Started
Assessing 21st Century Skills Recently, one of the teachers who is participating in our district’s 21st Century Learning grant project came to talk with me about assessing 21 century skills – one of the expectations for teachers in this project. Her observation was that students frequently practice the skills when engaged in research or project based learning. The thing she was struggling, with, though, was how to “grade it.” Assessing skills like collaboration, information literacy, creativity, self-direction, and critical thinking seems like a difficult task–when you think of assessment as “grading.” So to effectively assess skills and habits of mind –we must design a performance task for the students. One of the most difficult tasks of designing an effective formative assessment tool for 21st century skills is deciding what criteria should be included. These items become the criteria upon which a rubric or checklist can be built.
- Amazing Resources to Discover and Curate Digital Curriculum for Students and Teachers... Part Two 0 Comments February 9, 2013 By: Michael Gorman Feb 9 Written by: 2/9/2013 2:25 PM ShareThis I hope you enjoyed the past post and welcome you to “Part Two” in a series of posts dedicated to those educators attempting to curate the Digital Curriculum. Part Two… Amazing Resources to Discover and Curate Digital Curriculum for Students and Teachers -– Mike Gorman ( As discussed last time, there are increasing demands to move textbooks and lecture from the center of instruction. LiveBinders LiveBinders describes itself as the knowledge sharing place. You can learn more about LiveBinders in this 90 second video, it could be the best minute and one half that you spend today. Take Control of Information View links like pages in a book instead of URLs on a pageCombine uploaded PDFs and Word docs with links in one binderGo paperless one LiveBinder at a time Save Time Make an Impression It does not take long to find out how to use LiveBinders in Education. My Big Campus
Creating sign language books in Book Creator This example shows how powerful Book Creator can be as a tool for breaking boundaries. Lisa Johnson is the CEO and founder of TechChef4u, an Apple Distinguished Educator, and a mother of two mobile natives. Lisa also serves the Eanes ISD school district in Austin, Texas as an Educational Technologist supporting their K12 1:1 iPad initiative. Gone are the days of limited tools for students to demonstrate understanding. A growing trend in classrooms is the ability for students to create and author their own content… many times in the form of a book. The inspiration – History ebook Back in April 2014 I worked with Hill Country Middle School in Austin on a collaborative ebook between 8th grade and 3rd grade students. 8th grade students composed books using Book Creator and Scrap Pad based on historical topics covered in the year. Once the framework of the book was set, 8th grade students used a Google Doc to provide 3rd grade students with a list of images they would need to complete the book.
Content Curation: Beyond the Institutional Repository and Library Archives - Personal Knowledge Management for Academia & Librarians If you are an academic librarian, you have been hearing about Data Curation, Content Curation, Information Curation or Digital Curation for years. And the terms can be applied in several different ways. There are the curation activities surrounding purchased library materials and the curation of faculty and student items (like theses and dissertations for example). Archivists have been intimately involved with all sorts of curation activities since archives existed, and were early adopters of digital curation and finding aids for the items they maintained. Most recently, Data Curation has been in the forefront of librarian discussions in response to government mandates to make research information widely available; first with the medical field, and more recently with the National Science Foundation requirements for data curation plans in all NSF grants. Clay Shirky (www.shirky.com) suggests that “[the problem] is not information overload. References: Good, Robin. Kanter, Beth.
Education Week Teacher Professional Development Sourcebook: Writing Re-Launched: Teaching with Digital Tools Published Online: April 4, 2011 Published in Print: April 4, 2011, as Writing Re-Launched: Teaching with Digital Tools Second grader Daisy Mora Gomez uses an iPad application called "Puppet Pals" to work on her pre-writing skills. —Manny Crisotomo Innovative language arts teachers find that adapting writing instruction to technology can enhance engagement without sacrificing the fundamentals. The nature of writing has shifted in recent years. So why does writing in school still so often involve a pen, paper, and a hardbound print dictionary? “Schools are in catch-up mode,” says Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, the director of national programs and site development for the National Writing Project, a federally funded program that provides professional development in writing instruction. There are plenty of reasons for teaching writing without a technology component, including lack of resources, lack of training, and the pressures of testing. —Manny Crisostomo Writing as Collaboration Writing to Be Read
Goal 10: Spread Your Knowledge (15+ Tools to Bookmark, Aggregate, Curate) Posted by Shelly Terrell on Thursday, June 14th 2012 Goal 10 of The 30 Goals Challenge for Educators! Click the link to find out more about the new changes to this year’s 30 Goals Challenge for Educators! ““If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it. ” ~ Margaret Fuller Short-term- share resources you have collected about a topic with colleagues at school or online. Long-term- develop a community for sharing resources in your teaching environment. My Personal Thoughts About This Goal As educators, we are in the business of learning. Resources Related to This Goal I love learning. The tools that I use meet a few criteria: They have a free app! Tools Diigo- saves all your bookmarks in one location accessible anywhere with the Internet, allows you to highlight sections on websites and make notes, takes clippings, tag, search, and more! More resources: Important News Check out my Pinterests for other posts with this goal or ask me to add yours! Challenge:
26 Free (or Free-to-Try) Content Curation Tools Content is still king, but it isn't always practical or cost effective for marketers to produce brand-new, meaty, thought-leadership level content pieces on a regular basis. That's where curating content can come in handy. Content curation offers a nearly limitless method of fueling your inbound marketing efforts. What's more, sharing and celebrating the work of others helps get you on their radar and can forge valuable, long-term relationships with the content authors. To help you curate, here's a list of 26 tools you can use to find, aggregate and share your content with the world, be it in a blog roundup, big list of resources or to share via social. 1. A granddaddy of content curation, in practice if not in tenure, Pinterest is one of the Internet's most popular sites for culling content. Pinterest for Business takes curated pinning to the next level, making it easy to collate your favorite pins, market your business (or your clients'), and even promote products and services. 2. 3.
Launches Connotate4 - Connotate Leading provider of intelligent web scraping makes it easier than ever to collect and transform Webdata for strategic business use New Brunswick, NJ – April 23, 2014 – Connotate, the enterprise-grade datapipe for Web-sourced information, or Webdata, today announced an update of its core technology that simplifies and streamlines the Webdata extraction process and assures complete coverage of today’s highly dynamic websites. At the center of Connotate4 is a custom browser that leverages the industry standard Webkit engine, which powers leading browsers like Safari and Chrome. “Combining Connotate’s best-in-class patented machine-learning algorithms with our browser cements our position as the industry-leading web extraction technology,” said Connotate CEO, Keith Cooper. Connotate has six (6) patents that support its Web data extraction technology. “Connotate4 allows us to scale in ways we could never do before.
Cycles of Learning Part One Digital Learning … Top 3 Resources to Discover and Curate Digital Curriculum for Teachers and Students Happy Holidays and welcome to “Part One” of a series of posts dedicated to those attempting to curate the Digital Curriculum. Please enjoy and share this post via email or a retweet. While you are at it, I would appreciate that you take a moment to subscribe to this Blog by RSS or email and follow me at (mjgormans). Also, feel free to contact me about any conference, in-service plans, or PD you might wish to include me in. (mjgormans@gmail.com). Part One… 12 Resources to Discover and Curate Digital Curriculum for Students and Teachers -– Mike Gorman ( As education begins to embrace technology and digital resources, we as educators must also remember that these new tools allow teachers to move students at the center of their learning. Symbalooedu.com Symbaloo allows you to organize and share the best of the web with your students. Students can also become powerful curators and collaborators with their own Symbaloo account. Diigo.com Beyond the Bookmark