Thing 6: Curation Tools

This is a topic near and dear to my heart.  I was lucky enough to be able to hear Joyce Valenza speak in person at the NYLA Conference in Buffalo about curation a couple of years ago.  It was a wonderful presentation and provided much thought-provoking information for me for sure.

I use both Delicious and Diigo.  At school, I really like Diigo because it is extremely school-friendly and allows students to share with each other and me, as well as allowing them to highlight, archive, and sticky note articles.   I have used Delicious since my days in online library school at MU so I guess I'm just old school there!

At my school we have been using NoodleTools for our citations for several years now and they have recently added some really great new features for archiving and curation, including allowing students to start a citation from a webpage, archive webpages, highlight information on web articles, and allowing students to easily share notes, cites, and articles with faculty and each other.  If you haven't looked at this great and extremely cost-effective resource you should. 

I reviewed paper.li and Scoopit as part of my exploration.  I really liked both but can honestly say that I could not use paper.li at my school because of the restrictions on access to social networking sites.  It would definitely defeat the purpose for sure!  Scoopit was easy to use and really kid friendly in terms of graphics and access.  I liked it better than Pinterest although I can see a way to use both effectively in a school setting.  I think we will try to use Scoopit as part of our Freshmen Common Core research unit to share what articles we are selecting to answer our guiding question. 

For curation at TAE we also have used www.only2clicks.com.  In fact, one of our social studies teachers uses it on his website and found it to be extremely efficient and effective for him and the kids. 

Keeping up with curation seems to be my issue!  I tend to use a tool and then not have time to stick with the updates or add new topics.  Time is never our friend in today's world so if anyone has a trick that helps them stay on top of staying on top of things I'd love to hear it!