Thursday 30 January 2014

Day 3: BYOD for Learning and Curating #BYOD4L


Today's topic for BYOD4L is curating. I have to say I am a huge fan of curating tools to help organise the many interesting resources I come across into manageable chunks.

Curating allows you to collect and archive digital assets. Initially I began by favouriting tweets so that I could go back to them at a time I could look in more depth at the associated link to a article, website or perhaps video. I also began a private blog I refer to as my treasure trove of useful stuff! Here I could write a few lines, include links to the item of interest, maybe embed a photo or video. I the assigned a few tags to the post. The tagging is useful because as your collection grows, it means you can go back and find things by searching for that associated tag. Putting in a few keywords helps too as over the course of time that 'obvious' tag may not be so memorable!




Then in recent years, some really nifty and easy to use tools have been developed that enable a more visual way to collect and organise.

Below are some of my favourite tools and how I am using them. I should add that for this post I am just looking at this from the perspective of how I curate for my own needs. How I use this collections to share with others will make for a future post!

Twitter
I use Twitter daily, skimming through my lists. (If you don't know how to organise those you follow into lists take a look at this post: Creating lists on Twitter). Very often this takes place on my journey to and from work so from my mobile phone. If I find a tweet I want to save, I do so as a favourite.  

Storify
We have been curating the tweets from the daily TweetChats as a Storify story. The tool allows you to curate social networks to build social stories, bringing together media scattered across the Web into a coherent narrative. We curated all tweets that contained #BYOD4Lchat. These display in a panel on one side and you choose which you wish to drag across to your story board. You can add text boxes at any point which helps to provide context for the tweets. 


Scoop.it

This is an example of one of my 'scoops' - Talking a look at MOOCs. As I come across a article of interest I can simply enter the URL in the new scoop box and it is added to my collection. It automatically grabs an image from the webpage, the title and a few lines from the text. You have the option of adding your own thoughts in a further text box. 



Chrissi Nerantzi is curating Smart Devices for Learning which will be of great interest to the BYOD4L community.


Bundlr
Whilst this doesn't look at nice as Scoop.it, those that like lists may warm to it. Again you can collect links and organise them in topics. I curate articles on Google Glass in one of my bundlrs.

Pinterest
I began using this tool to curate infographics. Previously I had saved the image as a file and stored maybe on my PC, laptop or pendrive. Very often I couldn't quite remember where or indeed after time remember exactly what I had saved. By creating themed virtual pinboards I can now access these from any device I choose to. You can pin images you see or upload your own. Some of the boards I have created include:
I had the opportunity to show Andrew Middleton and Rob Appleyard what Pinterest looks like this afternoon.



Paper.li
I created a BYOD4L digital paper using #BYOD4L and @melsiguk. This tool curates tweets and presents them into a newspaper like article. What I like about this, is that it captures a random collection of tweets from what could be a large community and quite often enables me to pick up on useful tweets I may have missed in the stream of tweets going through Twitter. 



Edshelf
This a great tool to search for and curate apps by organising them into themed group. At the bottom of each BYOD4L topic page is a link to a collection of related tools curated using Edshelf. You can also embed your collection in your blog or website. See below. 



My Edshelf collection of tools for CURATING




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