Pearltrees - Collect & Share Save bookmarks, documents, files, ebooks, photos, videos, notes and more. Organize them into meaningful collections. Discover and share millions of contents on your favorite topics. With Pearltrees, organize all your interests anywhere, anytime! Dedicated versions of Pearltrees also exist for schools and enterprises. Media says:"The most elegant and visual way of collecting and sharing online content". Pearltrees can be useful in many situations: Personal life: Tech enthusiast? Work: On Pearltrees you can collaborate with your colleagues to manage knowledge efficiently, mutualize best practices, and share notes across your entire company. Education: Pearltrees is now one of the most used tools by teachers and students.
Content Curation Primer Photo by Stuck in Customs What is Content Curation? Content curation is the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme. The work involves sifting, sorting, arranging, and publishing information. Content curation is not about collecting links or being an information pack rat, it is more about putting them into a context with organization, annotation, and presentation. People and organizations are now making and sharing media and content all over the social web. Content Curation Provides Value from the Inside Out What does that mean for nonprofits and the people who work for them? For some staff members, content curation can be professional of learning. The biggest challenge to becoming a content curator is getting past the feeling of “content fried” or so much good content and so little time to digest it. The Three S’s of Content Curation: Seek, Sense, Share Getting Started
Assessing 21st Century Skills Recently, one of the teachers who is participating in our district’s 21st Century Learning grant project came to talk with me about assessing 21 century skills – one of the expectations for teachers in this project. Her observation was that students frequently practice the skills when engaged in research or project based learning. The thing she was struggling, with, though, was how to “grade it.” Assessing skills like collaboration, information literacy, creativity, self-direction, and critical thinking seems like a difficult task–when you think of assessment as “grading.” So to effectively assess skills and habits of mind –we must design a performance task for the students. One of the most difficult tasks of designing an effective formative assessment tool for 21st century skills is deciding what criteria should be included. These items become the criteria upon which a rubric or checklist can be built.
- Amazing Resources to Discover and Curate Digital Curriculum for Students and Teachers... Part Two 0 Comments February 9, 2013 By: Michael Gorman Feb 9 Written by: 2/9/2013 2:25 PM ShareThis I hope you enjoyed the past post and welcome you to “Part Two” in a series of posts dedicated to those educators attempting to curate the Digital Curriculum. Part Two… Amazing Resources to Discover and Curate Digital Curriculum for Students and Teachers -– Mike Gorman ( As discussed last time, there are increasing demands to move textbooks and lecture from the center of instruction. LiveBinders LiveBinders describes itself as the knowledge sharing place. You can learn more about LiveBinders in this 90 second video, it could be the best minute and one half that you spend today. Take Control of Information View links like pages in a book instead of URLs on a pageCombine uploaded PDFs and Word docs with links in one binderGo paperless one LiveBinder at a time Save Time Make an Impression It does not take long to find out how to use LiveBinders in Education. My Big Campus
Content Curation: Beyond the Institutional Repository and Library Archives - Personal Knowledge Management for Academia & Librarians If you are an academic librarian, you have been hearing about Data Curation, Content Curation, Information Curation or Digital Curation for years. And the terms can be applied in several different ways. There are the curation activities surrounding purchased library materials and the curation of faculty and student items (like theses and dissertations for example). Archivists have been intimately involved with all sorts of curation activities since archives existed, and were early adopters of digital curation and finding aids for the items they maintained. Most recently, Data Curation has been in the forefront of librarian discussions in response to government mandates to make research information widely available; first with the medical field, and more recently with the National Science Foundation requirements for data curation plans in all NSF grants. Clay Shirky (www.shirky.com) suggests that “[the problem] is not information overload. References: Good, Robin. Kanter, Beth.
Education Week Teacher Professional Development Sourcebook: Writing Re-Launched: Teaching with Digital Tools Published Online: April 4, 2011 Published in Print: April 4, 2011, as Writing Re-Launched: Teaching with Digital Tools Second grader Daisy Mora Gomez uses an iPad application called "Puppet Pals" to work on her pre-writing skills. —Manny Crisotomo Innovative language arts teachers find that adapting writing instruction to technology can enhance engagement without sacrificing the fundamentals. The nature of writing has shifted in recent years. So why does writing in school still so often involve a pen, paper, and a hardbound print dictionary? “Schools are in catch-up mode,” says Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, the director of national programs and site development for the National Writing Project, a federally funded program that provides professional development in writing instruction. There are plenty of reasons for teaching writing without a technology component, including lack of resources, lack of training, and the pressures of testing. —Manny Crisostomo Writing as Collaboration Writing to Be Read
Goal 10: Spread Your Knowledge (15+ Tools to Bookmark, Aggregate, Curate) Posted by Shelly Terrell on Thursday, June 14th 2012 Goal 10 of The 30 Goals Challenge for Educators! Click the link to find out more about the new changes to this year’s 30 Goals Challenge for Educators! ““If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it. ” ~ Margaret Fuller Short-term- share resources you have collected about a topic with colleagues at school or online. Long-term- develop a community for sharing resources in your teaching environment. My Personal Thoughts About This Goal As educators, we are in the business of learning. Resources Related to This Goal I love learning. The tools that I use meet a few criteria: They have a free app! Tools Diigo- saves all your bookmarks in one location accessible anywhere with the Internet, allows you to highlight sections on websites and make notes, takes clippings, tag, search, and more! More resources: Important News Check out my Pinterests for other posts with this goal or ask me to add yours! Challenge:
Launches Connotate4 - Connotate Leading provider of intelligent web scraping makes it easier than ever to collect and transform Webdata for strategic business use New Brunswick, NJ – April 23, 2014 – Connotate, the enterprise-grade datapipe for Web-sourced information, or Webdata, today announced an update of its core technology that simplifies and streamlines the Webdata extraction process and assures complete coverage of today’s highly dynamic websites. At the center of Connotate4 is a custom browser that leverages the industry standard Webkit engine, which powers leading browsers like Safari and Chrome. “Combining Connotate’s best-in-class patented machine-learning algorithms with our browser cements our position as the industry-leading web extraction technology,” said Connotate CEO, Keith Cooper. Connotate has six (6) patents that support its Web data extraction technology. “Connotate4 allows us to scale in ways we could never do before.
Cycles of Learning Part One Digital Learning … Top 3 Resources to Discover and Curate Digital Curriculum for Teachers and Students Happy Holidays and welcome to “Part One” of a series of posts dedicated to those attempting to curate the Digital Curriculum. Please enjoy and share this post via email or a retweet. While you are at it, I would appreciate that you take a moment to subscribe to this Blog by RSS or email and follow me at (mjgormans). Also, feel free to contact me about any conference, in-service plans, or PD you might wish to include me in. (mjgormans@gmail.com). Part One… 12 Resources to Discover and Curate Digital Curriculum for Students and Teachers -– Mike Gorman ( As education begins to embrace technology and digital resources, we as educators must also remember that these new tools allow teachers to move students at the center of their learning. Symbalooedu.com Symbaloo allows you to organize and share the best of the web with your students. Students can also become powerful curators and collaborators with their own Symbaloo account. Diigo.com Beyond the Bookmark
Bing for Schools exits beta and goes into use with thousands of schools Last summer Microsoft announced that it was beginning work on a new version of Bing that was aimed at schools called Bing for Schools. The idea for Bing for Schools was to provide a somewhat sanitized version of the Bing search engine that would help insulate kids using computers at school from content that they shouldn’t be able to see. Microsoft started with a small pilot program for Bing for Schools that had operated in five schools. Microsoft's search engine for schools is ad free and there will be no charge for schools to use the special version of Bing. The program is currently operating in 5,000 schools around the country with over 4.5 million kids participating. Once the school totals 30,000 credits, a Surface tablet with Type Cover will be sent directly to the school. SOURCE: PC World
Getting It Wrong: Surprising Tips on How to Learn For years, many educators have championed “errorless learning," advising teachers (and students) to create study conditions that do not permit errors. For example, a classroom teacher might drill students repeatedly on the same multiplication problem, with very little delay between the first and second presentations of the problem, ensuring that the student gets the answer correct each time. The idea embedded in this approach is that if students make errors, they will learn the errors and be prevented (or slowed) in learning the correct information. People remember things better, longer, if they are given very challenging tests on the material, tests at which they are bound to fail. In one of their experiments, students were required to learn pairs of “weak associates,” words that are loosely related such as star-night or factory-plant. The team found that students remembered the pairs much better when they first tried to retrieve the answer before it was shown to them.
Why Curation Will Transform Education and Learning: 10 Key Reasons There is a growing number of key trends that are both rapidly revolutionizing the world of education as we know it and opening up opportunities to review and upgrade the role and scope of many of its existing institutions, (as the likeliness that they are going to soon become obsolete and unsustainable, is right in front of anyone's eyes). George Siemens, in his recent Open Letter to Canadian Universities, sums them up well: 1) An Overwhelming Abundance of Information Which Begs To Be OrganizedThe goal is not (and probably it never was) to learn or memorize all of the information available out there. It's just too much even if we focus only on the very essence of it. From the New York Times: "...Mr. Curation fits in as a more appropriate approach to learning and to prepare for real-world work challenges, by allowing learners to construct meaning by having to research and to understand and to create new relationships between different information-elements.