In the etmooc (Educational Technology Media Open Online Course), I have learned how to use some interesting sites where you can curate and collaborate with information. This has been incredibly eye-opening, useful, and liberating. I began by lurking, dabbled by retweeting, blabbed with tweeting, flirted with reviewing, buzzed on my blog, and now – with these exciting new sites – aspire to curate.
To begin, I am excited to be a publisher of stories or sites of interest to share with my “PLN” (Personal Learning Network), my colleagues, and friends. The two sites that turned this simple hobbit-sized teacher into a powerful publisher (okay, I do exaggerate the power part, but not the hobbit part) are Storify and Paper.li.
1) Paper.li curates the material for you from tweeters that you choose to follow in your paper.li
- Here’s mine – THE WEEKLY HUNNI
2) Storify allows you to curate your material by adding a “STORIFY THIS” button in your toolbar. So, each interesting or relevant read can be “Storified”.
- Here’s MY COLLECTION today
- with some favourite student blogs, some 21st century Learning info, some writing info, and spoken word poetry of Shane Koyzcan “to this day” and Sarah Kay. http://storify.com/PamelaHunnisett/storypad
To help me sort through the confusion, this blog “Paper.li vs Storify” explains the pros and cons between Paper.li and Storify. I, actually, like both. I feel that Paper.li does a great job curating the PD reading of interest to me, which might interest my PLN too. Whereas Storify offers me the power to select some great blogs, sites, articles, etc.. that I can customize to my audience and purpose. (i.e. to share with my classes, or my Committee work on Learning Commons, or Travel info, etc…). If I get to teach Creative Writing next year, then Storify is definitely a site I’d teach the students to use to curate their sources of inspiration with the PLN of the class.
3) Finally, another two AWESOME sites for collecting information is DIIGO and EVERNOTE (these are buzz sites among educators). This can be for personal use or collective usage (i.e. like our shared drive – but easier access, upload, and downloads).
a. DIIGO – offers a “Bookmarking” site that is easy to organize all the websites we educators collect.
b. EVERNOTE – offers a sharing site of files and websites – allowing access to your storehouse of info, from any computer with internet access.
Such sites could offer awesome “sharing” and PD opportunities among staff and like-minded friends and PLNs. I look forward to learning how to become “buzzingly” proficient with these bits and bites of sites that improve my interaction with the golden honey of the world wide web!
thehunni 