Thing 8: Digital Curation Tools

I have been working really hard this year to make my lessons more student centered. I try to approach each lesson with my learners individual needs in mind. Whenever I get the opportunity to build in choice and student-driven paths to learning I take advantage of it. Unfortunately this can be a challenge when I am pushing into classrooms and don't always have the decision of how a unit or lesson is structured. Nonetheless there is plenty of opportunity out there when I force myself to approach each lesson and unit through the lens of my diverse learners.

When approaching the topic of curation for this assignment I decided to focus less on curation for the teacher or me the librarian, and more on the students. I played around a little with Follett Collections last year, but fell short of making it a meaningful tool for students. So, when approaching this assignment I wanted to explore the tool more and also teach students the value this tool could have in helping them personally as a learner.

For this particular unit students in 5th grade were challenged with building a brochure that would convince someone to come and visit their preselected country. In the beginning of the unit students came to the library where we walked through the "Wonder" stage of inquiry and students collaborated on a Padlet, sharing ideas about what makes a country successful. After we determined that culture, economy, geography, history and government are all important to a country's success, we then had a plan for what information we needed to collect in the "investigate" stage of research.

Typically during the investigate stage, I teach students new resources that will help them with the specific topic of study. This is extremely valuable, but only scratches the surface of the skills during this stage of inquiry. In addition it also doesn't really personalize the learning for students, sure I am giving them an option for sources, but I am not teaching how to curate resources or giving them the ownership of evaluating their own resources. They are just using the tool I share to gather their information because I told them that it was a reliable and good resource. I would consider this to be a total teacher driven lesson. Wanting to improve this unit and focus on making this particular lesson more student-centered and applicable to learning beyond this particular lesson, I shifted my approach.

When we began the "investigate" stage we reviewed all the resources that they had already learned and which ones they thought would be useful for this assignment. I then shared a few new resources with them. I told them that I wasn't going to tell them what resources that they had to use for this assignment, but that they were going to have to use all the skills they had learned in the Fall for evaluating resources to gather reliable and meaningful resources for this unit. This created a need for them to have a place to gather their resources, which lead into a great discussion about curation. I then showed them how to use Follett Collections to gather their resources in one place. This tool is extremely powerful in that it allows students to add a bookmarklet to their toolbar so that they can add resources to their collection when they are on websites or in databases. I did run into a little bit of trouble adding the bookmarklet on a few of the devices and still haven't been able to figure out why, but other than that the tool was amazing for curating resources. They were even able to add resources directly from the catalog. I would eventually like their classmates to be able to search their collections, which is an option, but right now I have only been able to make them private. I see the option to make them available to other students at Lake George, but it is greyed out. Does anyone have experience with this tool and know how to do that? I think having a larger audience for their curation, puts more emphasis on the importance of curating quality resources, so I would love to add that option.

Along with teaching the tool, I used Jennifer Gonzalez's (who I love) verbiage of "curator or dumper" to drive home the point of meaningful curation. We brainstormed the benefits of this curation tool and one resounding takeaway was that it was going to help us organize our resources in one place so that when they went to take notes all their resources would be there. This led to a great conversation about how if the purpose of curating is to help us organize and make the note-taking stage easier then we may not want to dump every resource we find. Then we reviewed the valuable skills of meaningful curation, discussing the value of being a good consumer of information and evaluating the sources we decide to curate. A great deal of positive reflection was made about how they have the choice of what information they curate and how they curate, but the ultimate goal is to make the research process easier. Some students felt that dumping was easier for them. This was powerful, because we were able to have a great discussion about their individual learning behaviors. I was then able to share that if "dumping" works better for them and then going back into their collection and evaluating works, then they have that option. However, I did acknowledge that this might require them to go back out and gather more resources later if they find out they don't have enough good resources. I loved this discussion. It felt very student-centered and meaningful.

If you are a Follett user and you haven't explored "collections" I highly recommend it. Here is an example one of the students collections:

Next year I want to build in independent reflection time with each student to discuss the sources that they decided to curate and why. This would allow for positive student reflection and also be a great approach to assessment.