Digital Curation is the is the selection, organization, maintenance, preservation, and collection of digital assets. Previously the term has been used to describe the work of archivists, librarians, historians, scientists, and scholars. Today it has been applied to interaction with the online world and the ways in which we can collect, organize and display the data and information we, as individuals, access online.
I wasn’t even aware that I was doing it, until I actually thought about it. On my laptop, I have a bookmarks bar where I have shortcuts to all the websites I access regularly. I also have bookmark folders where I add links to webpages that I know I’ll want to access in the future. I have separate folders for each subject such as sports, ELA ideas, Science etc.
My phone acts as my mobile curator. It organizes the apps and other information I put on it, but I control how it does it. It organizes my photos, videos, emails, and news into easily accessible apps, and I can control this by creating folders for some apps, adjusting the notification settings, and organizing the information in the format that works best for me.
I also use Feedly and Pinterest as online bookmarking sites. Feedly I generally use for websites that I only want to access if something has changed (such as blogs). Pinterest, on the other hand, I mostly use for the creative being inside of me. If I need an idea for something in the moment I’ll go on there. So I guess I don’t use it as a curation tool myself, but to access other people’s curation efforts. My main problem with Pinterest was that all my friends, who were following me on Pinterest, could see all the posts I had saved. Rather than find out how to make it private, I just stopped using it.
I feel that curation is very much a personalized concept. We can show our students what it means to be organized online, but everybody will have their own ways of doing that. Our devices already help us stay organized, we just have to be aware of the different apps and websites available to do that.
In my last placement, my Cooperating Teacher used Seesaw to share students’ work with their parents. This is an app from which students can independently document their learning and provides an audience for their work—their peers, parents, or the world. Their parents can access the app from home (or mobile) and view their children’s work. The students were excited about sharing their work with their parents, and the app provided a great platform to do this. The app automatically organized all the information into private folders for each child, so that only the people they had given access to it could view it. I hope use Seesaw in my classroom. I felt that it worked really well for students to organize their work to show their parents. I will make my students aware of applications such as Pinterest, and give them the option of using it or not.
Internet 4 Educators 