iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

When I saw the following headline from a German article by Nele Hirsch, I was immediately hooked to click my way through. Kuratierung als Bildungsherausforderung, or in English “Curation as an Educational Challenge“) was just the right headline for some of the thoughts, that have been going around in my head and have been a recurring popular topic of discussion with two cohorts of teachers I am currently coaching from Argentina and Canada.

The big questions we are pondering are about our responsibility, as educators, of

(1) being aware of curation (What is it? What are strategies? What is the urgency to bring curation into the classroom?)

(2) curating as an integral part of our own “NOW skills and literacies”?

(3) gaining skills and fluency in the use of current curation tools and platforms

(4) embedding curation skills in our current curriculum/subject area/ grade levels

In an educational setting, curation has a ton of potential as an academic task. Sure, we’re used to assigning research projects, where students have to gather resources, pull out information, and synthesize that information into a cohesive piece of informational or argumentative writing. This kind of work is challenging and important, and it should remain as a core assignment throughout school, but how often do we make the collection of resources itself a stand-alone assignment?

That’s what I’m proposing we do.

We are living in an era of information overload. There is so much content shared online that we actively seek out people who have good content curation skills to help us “sort the wheat from the chaff”.

A person with good curation skills saves us time by sifting through the vast abundance of content on the internet to select the best, most relevant resources on a specific topic or theme. The curator organizes, manages, and collates for their own use and shares with us.

If you look closely at most educators with a high following on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, or Instagram you’ll notice that most are great content curators and share excellent resources. Their sharing and content curation skills helped them build their PLN.

Curation is the “ability to find, to filter, to evaluate, to annotate, to choose which sources are valuable” (Valenza, Boyer , Curtis, 2014). In our information-rich age, not only is it necessary to curate, but creating content from curated resources is an excellent way to consolidate understanding and provides students with the opportunity to think critically and creatively. I have written about Content Curation and Digital Leadership before. I also include curation tools in the chapter, “The Other Social Media Tools” in Social LEADia because I believe that Storify, and curation tools like it…