Step 6: Using Content Curation (lll)

 Digital Curation Tools:
There are a plethora of free digital tools you can use to help with content curation. Tools generally fall into one of these three categories:

1. News discovery tools — Use your preferred news discovery tool to select and aggregate the content. News discovery tools save time by feeding you the most relevant content. Examples of news discovery  tools  include Feedly, Flipboard, Nuzzle, and following a hashtag on Twitter.
2. Curation tools — Use your preferred curation tools to display your content with context, organization, annotation, and presentation. Examples of curation tools include Scoop.IT, Flipboard, Diigo, Wakelet, LiveBinder, or a blog.
3. Sharing tools — Select with networks you share your curated content on. For example, you might share the content on Twitter, Google +, and Facebook. Some people will choose to follow your curated content via your curation tools ( such as follow you on Scoop.IT, Pinterest, Flipboard Magazine, or Diigo).

These include:

Blogs

Blogs posts are a popular way of curating content because:

• You can dive deeper and write a detailed elaboration. You may find that the act of writing helps to transform your vague ideas into well structured thoughts.
• You can customize and organize vast amounts of information in meaningful ways.
• You might write a post about a single article you have read, or create a roundup post. Ideally, you would add your own short annotations too.

Check out these examples of educators who curate content using blogs:

Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day as well as curating resources into his “Best of “ lists.  Doug Pete publishes a weekly roundup of posts that caught his eye on Ontario Edublogs. For those who are new to blogging , we recommend you work through our personal blogging series. This series takes you step-by-step through the process of setting up your own personal educator blog.

Wakelet

Wakelet allows you to save, organize and tell stories with content from around the web. This is a relative new tool that is becoming very popular with teachers. You can sign up for free or create a quick collection without signing up. There’s also a browser extension to save links from the web. Your collections can be public or private. You can also embedded collections on any blog or website. Here’s a simple example:Curation tools as a Connected Educator