Curation

Why and when are you using these tools/functionality?

Curation tools are ideal for both asynchronous and synchronous learning opportunities

• Assigned reading or viewing of instructional materials by students

• Individual or group curation of notes, artifacts, or resources

• Curations from any tool can be easily shared within any learning management system, or social media platform.

What are students doing?

• Reading, viewing, or interacting with curated instructional materials identified by the teacher

• Closely reading and evaluating content

• Organizing that content to reflect the highest quality of information

• Summarizing each piece to give it context explaining relevance to the collection and tagging resources for searchability.

• Creating curated 'playlists' or collections of student-identified notes, artifacts, or resources

• Creating academic portfolios

What are educators doing?

• Locating, evaluating, organizing and presenting digital instructional materials

• Using these tools to make critical thinking visible either during online discussions, or face to face.

• Sharing student work with parents, school, community and the world.

• Providing asynchronous access to resources for students

• Evaluating, and providing quality feedback on student work

• Teaching valuable 21st century skills in critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and creativity

What digital resources do educators need to use curation tools?

• Any device with a browser and broadband access

• Educator access to create playlists or collections for student access

General guides to curation in the classroom

Take Note: How to Curate Learning Digitally

Curating Content for Classrooms, Families and Students

Curation Activities and Lessons

Teacher or Student Curated Resources: Curate collections to gather resources or demonstrate learning.

Ranked Collection: Students collect a set of articles, images, videos, or even whole websites based on a set of criteria (the most “literary” song lyrics of the year, or the world’s weirdest animal adaptations) and rank them in some kind of order, justifying their rankings with a written explanation or even a student-created scoring system. Each student could be tasked with creating their own collection or the whole class could be given a pre-selected collection to rank. This would be followed by a discussion where students could compare and justify their rankings with those of other students. (Bloom’s Level: Evaluate)

Shared Trait Collection: This would house items that have one thing in common. This kind of task would work in so many different subject areas. Students could collect articles where our government’s system of checks and balances are illustrated, images of paintings in the impressionist style, videos that play songs whose titles use metaphors. It could even be used as part of a lesson using the concept attainment strategy, where students develop an understanding of a complex idea by studying “yes” and “no” examples of it. By curating their own examples after studying the concept, they will further develop their understanding of it. (Bloom’s Level: Understand).

Literature Review: As the first step of a research project, students could collect relevant resources and provide a brief summary of each one, explaining how it contributes to the current understanding of their topic. As high school students prepare for college, having a basic understanding of what a literature review is and the purpose it serves—even if they are only doing it with articles written outside of academia—will help them take on the real thing with confidence when that time comes. (Bloom’s Levels: Understand for the summarization, Analyze for the sorting and selecting of relevant material)

Video Playlist: YouTube is bursting at the seams with videos, but how much of it is actually good? Have students take chunks of your content and curate the best videos out there to help other students understand those concepts. In the item’s description, have students explain why they chose it and what other students will get out of it. (Bloom’s Levels: Understand for summarization, Evaluate for judging the quality of the videos)

Museum Exhibit: Task students with curating a digital “exhibit” around a given theme. The more complex the theme, the more challenging the task. For example, they might be asked to assume the role of a museum owner who hates bees, and wants to create a museum exhibit that teaches visitors all about the dangers of bees. This kind of work would help students understand that even institutions that might not own up to any particular bias, like museums, news agencies, or tv stations, will still be influenced by their own biases in how they curate their material. (Bloom’s Level: Understand if it’s just a collection of representative elements, Create if they are truly creating a new “whole” with their collection, such as representing a particular point of view with their choices)

Real World Examples: Take any content you’re teaching (geometry principles, grammar errors, science or social studies concepts) and have students find images or articles that illustrate that concept in the real world. (Bloom’s level: Understand).

Favorites: Have students pull together a personal collection of favorite articles, videos, or other resources for a Genius Hour, advisory, or other more personalized project: A collection of items to cheer you up, stuff to boost your confidence, etc. Although this could easily slide outside the realm of academic work, it would make a nice activity to help students get to know each other at the start of a school year or give them practice with the process of curation before applying it to more content-related topics.

Best Practices

The use of digital resources as learning materials offers almost limitless choices for educators to customize and personalize access to content and learning tools. Despite often being 'free,' these resources require educators to invest time and energy in their use. Some key issues to keep in mind.

Curation - educators locate, select, evaluate, categorize, organize, and present digital learning materials in a way that is instructionally and developmentally appropriate to their learning audience. Ideally, educators also teach students curation skills as knowledge constructors.

Fair Use - educators understand and respect intellectual property laws and guidelines and model responsible use of published materials for student learners.

Open Educational Resources - freely accessible, openly licensed text, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes.

Creative Commons - standardized copyright licenses and tools that permit more flexible usage beyond traditional copyright law.

Basic classroom management and engagement

• Curated digital content should be educational in design and function.

• Students will need to use keyword searches using educational vocabulary to ensure good matches and site selections. Examples modeled by the instructor.

• Discuss internet safety and proper online academic etiquette. Create specific classroom rules and consequences.

• Want to give a boost to those critical thinking skills? Encourage students to write! Have them reflect on and connect to previous learning or defend and give context to their selections. Promote peer evaluation and discussion about the content they are posting.

• Student engagement would be high as they are creating their own personal resources. Need to refer to norms for use and proper site selection.

Student privacy and other guidelines

• Be sure to get parent permission before posting student work publicly.

• Be aware that most of these tools have public galleries with unmoderated content.

• Revisit your security settings. If there are concerns about inappropriate comments, you may want to moderate posts if this is a feature. Many platforms offer the ability to approve posts before making them live.

• Check the age restrictions on the platform’s terms of service: Most require students to be at least 13 to curate their own collections unless parent consent is given. Students under the age of 13 can access educator created curations, but may be unable to open their own account and create their own without parent permission.

• Revisit Fair Use and Copyright laws with your students.