There has been a boom in digital tools presented to teachers and educators in recent years.
"The rate at which new sites have been released is absolutely dizzying. Every time you turn around, it seems there is a new site being heralded as the latest and greatest." (Dembo, S., & Bellow, A., 2013)
When gathering any of these tools for my toolkit, I was trying to keep in mind, the Five C's of Digital Curation Framework as put forth by Sharma and Deschaine (2013): Collection, Categorization, Critiquing, Conceptualization and Circulation. I am finding at this point that I have done a lot of Collecting and Categorizing but I am only starting with the critiquing of these tools. With many, I have only looked at them in the broadest of terms and I will need to try them out in a more meaningful way in order to properly know if they meet the requirement and standards of what I am hoping to use them for. However, it has been great fun exploring and discovering what was out there.
I have chosen to assemble my Toolkit on an Edshelf, "a socially curated discovery engine of websites, mobile apps, desktop programs, and electronic products for teaching and learning." If I was going to find useful tools, this to me was a great place to start. Edshelf allows you to curate multiple shelves, for example, if I wanted to gather all of my design tools on one shelf and curations tools on another, I could. There does not appear to be a way to sub-divide one shelf, however, so I have decided to put all the tools onto one shelf for this task. I have presented the shelf in list format so that my notes are visible and will show why I chose to include these tools.
My Web 2.0 Toolkit:
The following are some examples of these tools in use as I experiment:
Symbaloo
A global bookmarking tool.
I used it to provide my students with a direct link to relevant web tool sites as we worked on the GRA during their library time.
*I did encounter some difficulty with the Symbaloo bookmarker tool on my Mac. It was not working properly - response from their IT (Oct. 31/17) stated, "we are currently experiencing trouble with the Symbaloo Bookmarking tool on Mac OS. Our development team is aware of the issue. They have relayed that there is no set estimated time as to when the bookmarker tool issue will be resolved."
A global bookmarking and curation tool. Easy to group and share multimedia finds.
Uses in the library:
- gathering themed information/resources for teachers and students in the school as a base for research and projects (eg. Kindness; Biomes and habitats; Simple Machines; Social Justice)
- to put link in one place when presenting to students (eg. author visits)
Curation board for ideas galore.
Use in the library to collect examples for intended projects or get/share ideas. I had not used my Pinterest boards in a while and I was pleased to discover that there have been improvements in the ability to organize boards in numerous sub-sections.
Canva
Useful for students to create beautiful designs for presentations or projects.
For the Global Read Aloud this year, I used Canva to design a digital postcard to supplement the hand-drawn one students sent out.
Padlet
Collaborative bulletin board.
Sharing our learning with a buddy class in the USA while reading Mem Fox's books in this Padlet for the GRA.
Work cited
& (2016). Digital Curation: A Framework to Enhance Adolescent and Adult Literacy Initiatives. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 60(1), 71–78.
Dembo, S., & Bellow, A. (2013). Untangling the web: 2.0 tools to power up your teaching. Thousand Oaks: CA. p.viii-x
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