Powell's Ponderings

Curating like a Boss

by J.Powell

I remember when the term "hotlist" was just coming on the scene in the late 90s and into the 21st century. Working as an instructional technology specialist, one of my favorite ways to support my teachers was to help them pool resources together, mostly websites, in a user-friendly web page where their students could access them without the risk of typing in a long URL wrong. Webquests were picking up popularity and curating legit resources was the key to saving time and getting students on their way to the meat of the project without navigating the sometimes choppy waters of search engine retrieval.

Today, being a librarian is truly more exciting because of all the tools available to curate good credible web resources for my teachers and students. However, to develop the most successful curation resource, librarians need to adhere to certain guidelines and procedures. Nikki Robertson proposes that in order for a curated collection to be of most use to the patrons, a librarian needs to keep it updated by developing a professional learning network (PLN) which allows for quick access to resources and reviews. It's also paramount that the librarian supplement curated resources with their own stories and notes in order to personalize it for the intended audience (2012).

I have utilized Pinterest, Symbaloo, EdShelf, and Diigo to keep my resources in some sort of manageable order. However for this grad school assignment, I took on a tool named Pearltrees that I learned about at TCEA one year. To assist my science teachers and students on a Solar System project, I curated some web resources on the planets and their properties. I found Pearltrees extremely easy to use and customize. The embedded tools, like the web clipper and drag and drop feature made it easy to add websites to the Pearltree. It also allowed you to not only add internet resources, but also files, images, and notes. This allowed me to add in my own comments and contributions to the lessons, such as copyright information and links to credible royalty free photo sites. There are several ways to share the Pearltree. The easiest ways were embedded on my library website or shared as a URL via email or social media. It even had a QR code creator. The only downfall to this curation resource is that you are limited to a certain amount of Pearltrees with their free public plan. As a person who is always looking for free educational resources or OERs, I wish more features were opened up on the free plan. Still, it is a great tool which I could see helping my teachers and students find the content information they need in a visually appealing and organized fashion.

Professionally, Pearltrees and the other curation tools I have explored can assist me in building my own resource network. The more curated lists you maintain, the more you can bring to any PLN you are a part of. Keeping track of these items makes the management of resources easier, as you can store your curated lists and use them yearly, just checking for broken links rather than re-creating. The most important element of any curated resource is that students are able to see the resources in specific instructional contexts, in a way that makes sense to them (Valenza, Boyer & Curtis, 2014).

Personally, having curated resources has helped me keep track of ideas, projects, recipes and other things that are interesting to me. With the push to help student become more self sufficient with their own inquiry driven research, having these personal lists helps me know how to guide my students in the development of their own curated collections.

To further promote my Pearltrees, I would organize them on my blog or website, possibly on their own page depending on content. This way teacher and students alike could visit my page and simply find the Content area where the Pearltrees are listed. I would propose that I could conduct staff development with my teachers on how to create their own Pearltrees to further build the campus PLN.

References:

• Robertson, N. (2012). Content curation and the school librarian. Knowledge Quest, 41(2), E1.
• Valenza, J. K., Boyer, B. L., & Curtis, D. (2014). Curation in school libraries. Library Technology Reports, 50(7), 27.