Digital Curation/Content Curation in K-12 Education

There is a grand shift in resources available for students today.  Long gone are the days when the school library, which only contained books or magazines, was the only source for students to do research.  Filtering out what books you needed was a simple as asking the librarian where the section was on your given topic.  Today students have a plethora of resources at their fingertips on the web but the problem becomes how do they collect and filter through those resources in a meaningful way.  Content curation has become a powerful method for students to be able to think critically about what information is important and to organize the material in a way that makes sense to them.  It is also provides an opportunity to engage more of the learning styles of the students by having visuals for all of the content that they are collecting.

"Content curation is the process of collecting, organizing and displaying information relevant to a particular topic or area of interest." Wikipedia We have been asking our students to curate information in the form of research papers, bibliography's, posters, powerpoints, etc. for a long time, we just haven't called it curation before.  With the emergence of powerful web tools we are now able to have our students become curators in their learning in the digital world through Digital Curation.

I could spend an entire week researching and presenting different tools for content curation and still not have even scratched the surface.  Below I have included some links to a few different digital curation tools.  Finding the one that works for you may seem like choosing a random candy from a box  with your eyes shut but you have to start somewhere.

The basics for digital curation (once you have chosen which tool/platform you will use) is to

• Decide on a topic.  For example, World War 1.  It is important that you don’t have a bunch of content just thrown up all over your page. 
• Research and collect relevant key resources. Quality over Quantity.  This is where the filtering comes into play.  If you do a Google search for World War 1 you will get over 500 million sites.  That can be a bit overwhelming so make sure you are search savvy. 
• Narrow down what you are looking for into categories.  Sticking with the World War 1 theme, you could look for personal war hero stories, time lines, pictures, countries,  etc.  Then start with 3 good resources under each category.
• Upload your own original content.  Do you have pictures, documents, or a blog that is your own unique content?  Perfect, don’t forget that you have great resources to share too.
• Curate your resources.  Make it clear with whatever tool you are using what the content is.  If you are using something like pearltrees.com  then use relevant pictures for the covers of each collection.  Remember that a Content Curation is a rich visual tool.
• Share your curation.  Once you have done all that work in creating your specific content curation make sure to share it with others.  You know how we teachers are, let’s make it easy to find others resources, we all need a little help! Share, Share, Share!

I see content curation being used in education with students as an alternative or in addition to a bibliography.  Have your students create a content curation for any given topic and then have them upload relevant resources, videos, pictures, documents, etc. on their curation page.  This is the relevant piece for the student that will actively engage them in their learning and allow them to critically think about their resources and not be limiting to just text for their information.   If I were teaching a braiding unit in Cosmetology I might have them create a section on pictures of exemplars of braids, a video section with tutorials, and an ‘I’d like to try’ section.  That way rather than having me spoon feeding them the information they are finding content relevant to them and they become investigators  and invested in their own learning.

For a teacher content curation would be a great way to organize your own resources for your students.  For younger grades or to direct them to the specific sites and sources that you have you could create your own content creation.  Share your content creation with parents.  In many content creation tools there is the option to have others suggest resources to post on the curation, open that up to students and parents to give suggestions.  The possibilities are endless.

I know for myself a content curation page is so much more engaging and I remember more about what I have read in a visual format rather than just having a list of websites pasted in a Word document (ironically I have a list below).   If the sound of Content Curation scares you, start small, try it will just one assignment as see where it takes you. 

If you have any examples of assignments or resources that you use in your classroom with digital curation please share them below.  I am very interested to see how others are using content curation and your comments on it’s effectiveness.

Simple and Effective Content Curation Tools for use in the classroom:

• pearltrees
• scoop.it
• Kapsul
• Pinterest  There is an excellent article here on The Pinterest Guide for Teachers

Top 10 Free Content Curation Tools for Teachers

The above list is by no means exhaustive, I just thought I would give you a small few places to start so that you aren't overwhelmed.

Other Resources:

Here is a link to a Content Curation on Content Curation tools using Pearltree

How to be an Effective Digital Curator
Below is what embedding a content curation using pearltree into a blog looks like.