Curating for Kids

Even if you are not a tech savvy teacher, I can be certain that you have a list favorite websites you use as resources for your lessons. These may be local bookmarks in a browser or pinned, tagged, checked or bundled somewhere online. I applaud the effort to organize the massive amount of freely available information or advice. A well connected educator has developed a PLN (Personal Learning Network) in which not only are they gathering websites, but in fact sharing them with colleagues online. However, you may be missing the most important target audience: your students. Are you sharing with students as you make these valuable finds?

Curating is the process of gathering, reviewing and editing lists of online content for an audience. We do it for ourselves with our bookmarks but your students could benefit from your wise choices as well. With a bit a tweaking in the organization part, you could be providing lists to students based on topics, standards or even essential questions. If you move from local bookmarks, to online bookmarks, you’ve already made the move necessary to offer these bookmarks quickly and easily to students as you find them. Services such as Delicious, Diigo, mentormob and the newly popular Pinterest, make the sharing easy and the access for you, almost anywhere.  (For a quick list of BYOD resources, check out my Bit.ly bundle.) Providing a more direct list of educational and teacher approved web resources keeps students away from the unfettered wiki world. Not only that, those who do have the desire to learn more will have a teacher directed path.

But don’t stop with just links, videos and games are engaging resources to help students learn a concept from another point of view, review for a test, or delve deeper to satisfy curiosity. Youtube.com/education  provides hundreds of quality lessons by teachers. If you can’t find what you are looking for there, try Hippocampus, Sophia, Vimeo, or some more specific subject content such as Spanish is Your Amigo  or  Mathtrain.tv.  Remember it’s not just for the students. When parents want to help their child, the first place they look is at the list of resources provided by the teacher.

Now back to that collaborative piece. Teachers can curate together. Pinterest makes this simple by allowing you to add collaborators to a board. That is the efficiency we want in our work. Not only is a great resource vetted by your colleague but instantly shared with your students as well.

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