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My Goals for Curating Digital Resources and Tools

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My Goals for Curating Digital Resources and Tools

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Stay abreast of OERs, academic databases, and other digital educational resources that are available

Critically assess all digital resources and tools available to determine if the information is up to date, relevant to the information needs and interests of the school, and if it is credible

Utilize methods to sort, integrate, and share the digital resources and tools that support the inquiry needs of the school

Implement digital curation skills in the curriculum so that students can critically examine and synthesize content that they access on the internet

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Alliance for Excellent Education: Curating Digital Resources and Tools

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Alliance for Excellent Education: Curating Digital Resources and Tools

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Mark Ray and presenters, Elissa Malespina and Joyce Valenza lead this webinar. They describe how they have curated digital resource in the Future Ready Librarian Framework and offer advice for how to curate digital materials. The presenters also explain the importance selecting, integrating, and sharing digital resources for learning.

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Curating Digital Content Is a Complicated Task

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Curating Digital Content Is a Complicated Task

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This article written by Amanda M. Fairbanks provides examples of how two schools created their own curated content network to combat the multitude of informational sources available on the internet.

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For the Vail Unified School District in Arizona, the problem was not a lack of digital resources. Rather, the district needed a system for organizing the plenitude of resources already at its disposal.

Back in 2008, Vail, a 12,000-student district near Tucson, created an in-house wiki to manage its growing assortment of digital curricula and lessons.

What began as a modest wiki grew to become Beyond Textbooks, a digital clearinghouse that now contains more than 20,000 resources. Curated by teachers, for teachers, the wiki works in much the same way that an iPod sorts music into separate categories. By dividing material into grade and subject areas, it helps educators unpack state standards and places them into bite-size expectations for what teachers should teach.

Shortly after its launch, Vail discovered the district was hardly alone in its frustration with digital resource overload.

"The curriculum was paper, and we wanted to digitize it," said Kevin Carney, the executive director of Beyond Textbooks. Three years ago, Vail began granting access to other districts around the state. Now, 81 partners across Arizona are members, with 9,000 teachers sharing assessments, lessons, and materials.

"It's put sharing on steroids," Mr. Carney said.

In recent years, educators nationwide have become overwhelmed by the breadth and abundance of digital resources, whether open-source offerings or paid content. Rather than relying on individual educators to sift through endless material, many districts and states are helping to curate and catalog such resources, serving as the librarians of the digital age. But creating a repository of high-quality content which is also aligned to the Common Core State Standards, is no small task.

Mr. Carney estimates around $1 million went into the creation of Beyond Textbooks. Depending on the size of the district (and corresponding number of users), Vail charges an annual fee, which costs from $10,000 to $60,000 a year. So far, math is aligned to the common core, with English/language arts to follow.

According to Mr. Carney, of the top 10 districts in the state, four are Beyond Textbooks users. "Our ultimate goal is to improve student achievement across Arizona, not just within our district," he said. Vail consistently ranks near the top of the list.

Though districts and state-level organizations in 40 states and 10 different countries have approached the district in hopes of forming partnerships, Mr. Carney said, he remains concerned, for the time being, with maintaining the quality of the clearinghouse, not expanding its reach beyond state lines.

Since the project's launch, Vail has found that providing extensive professional development, not merely granting access, is the key to its success. Since July, the leadership team in the district has fanned out to 37 cities across the state to lead 75 workshops, with more to come later this fall.

"We don't look at this as a purely commercial enterprise. We're first and foremost educators," said Calvin Baker, the district's superintendent. "This is curated by teachers, not by someone on the 70th floor of a New York City high-rise. It's simple, but powerful: Teachers tend to trust other teachers."

Evaluating Materials

Over the years, printed textbooks have been the primary curricular resource, and states and districts have created lengthy adoption processes for approving such textbooks for use. But in the rapidly changing digital era, such processes-particularly, who should spearhead such efforts-are still being ironed out.

In Texas, much of the vetting is happening at the state rather than the district level. Project Share, a learning management system run by the Texas Education Agency, provides teachers with professional development and digital lessons. The materials, which Project Share creates and reviews, all meet state and college-readiness standards specific to Texas.

Project Share was launched in 2009, and has more than 900 lessons available across four main content areas for grades 8-12. Statewide, lessons have been replicated more than 15,000 times at regular public schools and open-enrollment charter schools.

But with such an ambitious undertaking, careful curating is key. "It motivates us not to become one big Google search," said Kerry Ballast, who runs Project Share.

The goal is to provide materials that meld with a teacher's normal workflow-and not to become yet another website to visit. "We're trying to curate good content, letting them know it's been reviewed and meets our standards, while also being mindful that there are a lot of resources out there," said Ms. Ballast.

Still, the top-down dissemination of information, particularly in a state the size of Texas, where more than 1,200 districts dot the landscape, is not without its difficulties.

Kate Loughrey, who oversees the Texas Virtual School Network, a state-run initiative that supplies schools with online coursework, said: "The biggest challenge in Texas is that we're such a big state, and there are so many school districts. Each is an independent entity. We have to make sure they're all aware this option exists and that they understand how it works."

But Susan Adelmann, the vice president of strategic partnerships for Follett School Solutions, a River Grove, Ill.-based education technology company, cautions that many teachers and districts wish to be active participants in the building and creation of new content, rather than being issued a state directive.

"There's a lot of local energy," said Ms. Adelmann. "Don't discount districts, even small districts, from wanting to influence their own future in some ways."

She sees part of the difficulty in disseminating content across an entire state to be the disparate levels of technology available in individual districts-and even among individual schools. Districts that have deployed successful 1-to-1 computing or bring-your-own-device initiatives, for instance, have needs for digital resources that are far different from those of a district just beginning the process.

One-Stop Shop

The 41,000-student Forsyth County, Ga., school system is helping to lead the digital charge. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Education awarded the district an Investing in Innovation, or i3, grant to build a districtwide personalized learning environment. Forsyth County wanted a one-stop shop for parents, teachers, and students. Previously, teachers visited one platform for instruction, another for grades, and another for offline assessments.

Since receiving the grant, the district has tweaked its learning management system to meet its needs. Rachel Hanson, an English/language arts teacher in the district, and Erin Zitka, a high school math teacher, were pulled from the classroom to harvest and create high-quality digital content.

"For a very long time that first year, we basically searched far and wide on the Internet for open and free resources," said Ms. Hanson.

While math resources were relatively easy to find, English/language arts proved more difficult. Once they had amassed 6,000 pieces of content, all aligned to the common core, Ms. Hanson and Ms. Zitka brought in teachers to create "highly engaging content, such as videos and podcasts-not PDF documents" to fill in the gaps.

Within "itslearning," the district's education management platform, resources are stored in the "community library." Students can log in and receive content tailored to their individual learning preferences. Teachers can search for content using keyword searches or individual state standards.

Mike Evans, the district's director of information and instructional support systems, is continually working to improve its effectiveness. Come January, teachers will be able to rate the effectiveness of each digital resource. Eventually, students will be able to weigh in too. Currently, based on a user's history, preferences, and popularity of use, (like Amazon and iTunes), itslearning provides a corresponding list of recommended resources based on academic need and learner-styles.

The system is now approaching 13,000 pieces of content. And while the early years were all about curating great content and finding high-quality objects, Mr. Evans sees a platform now populated by teacher-vetted resources-and a system that practically runs itself.

"Our role is helping teachers to personalize their classrooms by providing access to great resources," said Mr. Evans, who emphasized the need to give teachers the flexibility to select materials that meet their individual needs and passions as educators. "It's baby steps, but we're getting there."

Published in Print: October 2, 2013, as Digital Material Gets an Organizational Lesson

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Curating Digital Content Is a Complicated Task

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For the Vail Unified School District in Arizona, the problem was not a lack of digital resources. Rather, the district needed a system for organizing the plenitude of resources already at its disposal. Back in 2008, Vail, a 12,000-student district near Tucson, created an in-house wiki to manage its growing assortment of digital curricula and lessons.

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Curation Situations: Let us count the ways

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Curation Situations: Let us count the ways

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This article by Joyce Valenza provides many resources for selecting and sharing digital content. It also describes how students can be taught to curate, ways curation can be used with OERs, and that digital curation is an extension of a librarian's information literacy expertise.

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Curation is a funny word. When my colleagues and I wrote our Social Media Curation Library Technology Report for ALA, we struggled with a definition. The folks we interviewed across library land curated in several different ways and we used the term curation differently depending on current community needs or where they were in any particular project.

Back in 2014, our interviews and surveys led us to a taxonomy of digital curation. The professionals we spoke with described a process in which they began by collecting or gathering; moved to connecting content and resources for specific purposes and audiences; curated by adding value with context and commentary; and contributed by offering the community opportunities for collaboration, learning and growth. Along the way they experience collateral benefits of developing learning agility, building social capital and demonstrating creativity.

K12 digital curation is about getting our users/students/teachers to the good stuff, pointing them to content and resources they might not themselves discover with their own intuitive strategies. It's about saving teachers instructional time. But it's also about telling a story, organizing resources for sense-making, interpreting, presenting choices, palettes, and dashboards. And it's also about instruction and modeling for learners what it looks like to organize content and tools to manage our digital lives as information citizens.

Curation allows us to scale our practice and reach our community 24/7 at their points of need. Librarians who curate successfully not only build their brands, they contribute to their communities-students, faculty, administrators, and parents-as information professionals.

Social media curation efforts can help us fuel participatory culture as we build and connect communities.
Curating with kids
As students curate, they make decisions about authority and bias. They analyze, synthesize, and potentially present for a real audience. When librarians model and guide curation, they build more independent, agile learners capable of building learning networks, telling powerful stories, and carving out their own information niches. We may also guide learners as they develop digital portfolios to share their own curated work.

Through our curation efforts, we model potential life skills to our community. In school libraries, digital curation represents a workflow strategy for student inquiry. Teacher librarians also show young people how to curate around their own interests and how to create launchpads to manage their information worlds. By modeling and demonstrating what Harold Jarche calls personal knowledge mastery or management (PKM), we teach all of our stakeholders why to curate and how to do so effectively and thoughtfully."
Curating OER
Lately I've been asked to speak about the librarian's role in supporting OER (open educational resources) implementation through curation and I realize that in the K12 setting, curating and leveraging OER means very different things to district-level administrators, to principals, to department chairs, to teachers and to librarians. It often refers to the gathering and contextualizing of OER to replace expensive traditional texts and to include them in learning management systems.

Clearly, curation is not only about OER. For one thing, not all OER are created equally good and not all commercial products are at all bad. We need to figure how OER content might play nice with our existing valued investments to ensure ROI and to present teachers and learners with the most valuable OER options for their needs despite a growing number of impressive portals. This is a serious opportunity to lead and to address issues of access and equity.
The case for librarian as curation point guard
Librarians are uniquely qualified to curate digital assets. Districts who do not leverage their librarians in these activities are in effect benching their point guards. We live to play this game; we live to play this position. We possess full court vision, with knowledge of both the online and offline instructional landscapes. We study and understand our team members' talents and we earn their trust. We coach. We are largely unselfish and quick to respond to a challenge with calm leadership. We see opportunities. We anticipate multiple scenarios. We set up plays and make thoughtful passes. And we seek openness.

Beyond the basketball metaphor . . .

Digital curation is a translation and amplification of our traditional practice. We study the specific needs and interests of our communities. We have always been around to tame the information flow, to facilitate discovery and knowledge building. Curation is a direct translation of collection building, critical evaluation, instructional partnership, sense making, meeting community needs, knowledge building and instruction. With school wide perspective spanning disciplines, grade levels and learners' abilities, we build collections based on decisions relating to quality, diversity and local relevance. We organize resources for intellectual and physical access and equity and our efforts are portable, collaborative, embeddable, easy to access, customized for their audience and optimized for all platforms.

Of course, it's easy to see the connection of curation efforts to AASL's summarized standards: think, create, share and grow.

If you examine the Future Ready Librarians Fact Sheet, it is clear that these gears that address the librarian's role in the Future Ready Schools Framework and in connecting their practices, programs and spaces to educational innovation in schools.

Designs Collaborative Spaces

Builds Instructional Partnerships

Empowers Students as Creators

Curates Digital Resources and Tools

Facilitates Professional Learning

Ensures Equitable Digital Access

Invests Strategically in Digital Resources

Cultivates Community Partnerships

Curation Situations
Now let's count some of the many ways librarians are curating in digital landscapes:

Collections for broad, open discovery: Traditional library catalogs now expand to point to OER, free web content and digital tools, as well as community-developed content, including instruction and smaller curation efforts co-created by the librarian and the classroom teachers.

For specific school- or department-wide curricula (and replacing texts): Working in collaboration with district curriculum developers and teachers on special assignment, librarians thoughtfully gather digital nonfiction text sets and design media-rich, interactive textbooks to meet focused learner needs. These curations may be included in your OPAC. In fact, that activity is about to get far easier. Keep an eye open for Follett's new Collections by Destiny, debuting this week, which

creates new, collaborative ways for librarians, teachers and students to share free or purchased resources across the district, school or with other users. Students and teachers can access district resources in Destiny Discover and add them to any Collection. Each collection can include web pages, images, documents, eBooks, and more! Collections can also be shared publicly or kept private. With Collections, teachers can quickly pair content to instruction, and students can collect and curate resources for assignments, projects and tasks.

For supporting flipped and hybrid instruction: Librarians curate instructional videos, tutorials, posters and other resources they create, as well as those created by faculty partners & others for logical, point-of-need access. Co-curation and collaborative design with faculty and students and embeddedness, ensure the use of this instruction. See Michelle Luhltala's New Canaan High School YouTube archive.

: Informed by wide curricular knowledge, school librarians partner with classroom teachers to support the inquiry and workflow needs of specific learner groups for inquiry-based assessments or creative knowledge products. School librarians create topic-specific guides support regular inquiry projects. Among my most popular guides were my current events guides for national and global news and news analysis. A guide for AP US History supported work around document-based questions or DBQs. It included our teachers' instructional materials, organized lists of primary source portals, embedded ebook anthologies, document analysis tools, tools for organizing writing, documentation and remixing, On that guide also was a Google For supporting the inquiry and workflow needs of a specific learner group for an assessment/product Custom Search Engine I created for searching across the most important of those portals. My students expected me to co-create a LibGuide with their teachers for every major inquiry project.

For building individual lessons/instruction: A number of tools scaffold the creation of technology-rich lessons by prompting us to curate resources into instructional design. Check out Common Sense Media's Lesson Plans-models of innovative lesson plans that thoughtfully integrate digital tools with solid practice, as well as Hyperdocs templates for inspiration.

For supporting 1:1 environments: By creating cross-device palettes or dashboards, librarians ensure apps, instructional materials and all digital assets are available at learners' fingertips across devices. Curating dashboards of apps and digital tool options for various tasks-image editing, storyboarding, comic book making, digital storytelling-supports student individual choice and creativity. Symbaloo webmixes work well for ensuring that all the tools for a complex project are gathered and handy.

: Your school's PD efforts don't need to For professional development go poof. Librarians can archive events they lead, as well as the efforts of their colleagues to continue to support professional learning. I gathered all my lunch & learn events and the PD efforts of my colleagues on a LibGuide. You might choose tools like Livebinders or Pearltrees or LessonPaths. While that guide is not long active, check out my Copyright Friendly Smore, my Pearltrees of CC0 resources.

Librarians can curate news, tweets, feeds, posts and resources shared on social media for teachers', administrators' and students' areas of interest. This is often done using online newsletter curation tools like For current awareness: Scoop.it or Paper.li or Storify or RSS readers like Feedly. You may choose to embed and monitor hashtag searches for specific needs, for instance the #GoOpen initiative. Curating and embedding Twitter and RSS feeds relevant to breaking news for social studies and science classes presents an opportunity to gather together a variety of political lenses and global perspectives. You may decide to create a Storify to gather social meeting coverage around a school or current event.

For organizing/sequencing learning playlists: School librarians can work with teachers or curate learning playlists, conveniently sequencing texts/readings/resources and by adding questions and contextual notes and polls, using tools like LessonPaths, List.ly, and TES Blendspace, Nearpod and PearDeck. Tutorials may be first staged on archives YouTube, SlideShare, Flickr and later added to their playlists.

For supporting student interests: School librarians listen to their communities to curate resources and digital tools to fuel their interests. This might include promoting a steam punk collection on a Pinterest connected to GoodReads reviews or embedding a Symbaloo of resources to encourage coding and making on the library website.

For corkboard sharing: Social media corkboards point to events, connect community groups and highlight community news, achievements, and voices. This could be easily done using Padlet or Pinterest or Instagram. Invite trusted high school student volunteers to function as community archivists by pinning news and events.

For promoting reading, highlighting titles, organizing text sets: Pinterest boards are fabulous vehicles for sharing new acquisitions or for digital genrefication and face-out shelving of both print and digital titles. Digital curation allows for the easy organization of text sets in multiple formats. Check out Pinterest. Check out Kim Beeman's Padlet: 100 Picture Books to Read and Share (Ages 3 to 7) and Alida Hanson's many Pinterest boards of suggested readings for Weston High School or the Squalicum High School (WA) Library Pinterest boards.

For local archives: Using a bounty of new curation tools as flexible and virtually limitless containers. librarians can lead in creating local archives of images and videos of community interest. By curating tweets and social media, we create tangible evidence and lasting memories of such events as poetry slams, football games, art exhibits, science fairs, History Day, one-book-one-community celebrations and wax museum biography shares. A few years back our seniors collected oral histories from community elders, and from our veterans. We combined those interviews with newly scanned old community documents and maps and hosted our archive in a Ning.

For modeling a critical information practice: In teach a man to fish style, rather than continuing to push resources to our students, we can transfer responsibility and engage them as curators of their research-in-progress and their other original works and encourage them to curate the tools they need for workflow. As they research students develop critical skills in selecting, organizing, making meaning and sharing .Curation is a connected learning activity and a life strategy that encourages young curators participate in their areas of interest. For older students' major projects, tools like Paper.li, Scoop.it and Flipboard might work nicely.

: Librarians can lead by helping faculty and students select, curate and reflect on their work. Including student work in other curation efforts, including instruction, validates and celebrates their efforts. Encourage learners to curate their own work, and include text and video reflection, using portfolio platforms such as For portfolio building and creating galleries of student work Seesaw and EasyPortfolio. Display projects on tools like Pinterest or Instagram.

For personal knowledge management/mastery: Show students and colleagues how to informally manage personal staging areas or in-baskets keeping discoveries handy when anticipated situations for sharing arise. (Check out Harold Jarche's Seek/Sense/Share framework.) Some effective tools for the staging process are Evernote, Google Keep, Diigo and Scoop.it.

Creative nesting/embedding: Once you begin curating, you discover that your efforts become part of a larger network. One of your activities might easily be embedded in another. They all play nice together. Your Symbaloo tiles are not just links; they link to other Symbaloos and are are daisy-chained to each other. You embed your learning playlists in your LibGuides. Your LibGuides become part of your OPAC. You get to select appropriate platforms and creatively apply your skills of organization to create strategies that appear seamless to the user.

For telling your story: Curation is a strategy for telling our stories through the choices we make and the context we create around those choices. When we carefully select, sequence, analyze and organize media-images and quotes and video, as well as our original content and critical narrative, we synthesize unique stories that make meaning of our topics for an audience.

Evidence/Advocacy: Or building and amplifying your professional/institutional brand: Let your efforts show and share the work of those around you. Archive and display anchor charts, displays, lessons, curations, student creations, reports and feedback. Use your camera roll and share to Instagram, Facebook and Flickr. People both inside and outside your own learning community are likely to discover your impact, appreciate your work, trust you as a guide and model and build on your efforts. As that happens, your impact reflects on your school and enhances your own social capital

(Check out my poster of this list on Piktochart.)

Some other resources:
Curation Tools and Platforms Pearltrees OER Portals Pearltrees
Valenza, Joyce Kasman. " Curation." School Library Monthly 29.1 (2012)

Valenza, Joyce Kasman, Brenda L. Boyer, and Della Curtis. " Curation in School Libraries." Library Technology Reports 50.7 (2014): 27-36.

From this blog:

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Curation Situations: Let us count the ways - NeverEndingSearch

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Curation is a funny word. When my colleagues and I wrote our Social Media Curation Library Technology Report for ALA, we struggled with a definition. The folks we interviewed across library land curated in several different ways and we used the term curation differently depending on current community needs or where they were in any particular project.

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Digital Content Curation and Why It Matters to Librarians

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Digital Content Curation and Why It Matters to Librarians

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Steven Ovadia writes in his article that digital curation matters to librarians because individuals need to be able to recognize if the content they find on the internet is credible. He emphasizes the issue of authority, since determining the validity of an author is more challenging on digital sources than ones in print.

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OER: Issues, Possibilities and the Promise of Curation

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OER: Issues, Possibilities and the Promise of Curation

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A webinar presented by Joyce Kasman Valenza, PhD and high school librarian Brenda Boyer, PhD. This presentation discusses how curation needs to included in instruction, the best tools for digital curation, and how to incorporate OERs.

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Presented by Joyce Kasman Valenza, Ph.D., Assistant Teaching Professor, Rutgers University, MI Program; with Brenda Boyer, Ph.D., Librarian, Kutztown Area High School
Sponsored by Libraries Unlimited and ABC-CLIO
WATCH THE WEBINAR RECORDING If you attended the live session, you'll be emailed a CE certificate within 24 hours of the webinar. If you view the recording and would like a CE certificate, join the SLC @ The Forefront community and go to the Webinar Archives folder to take the CE quiz.
In K12 teaching and learning, no one is better prepared for curating digital resources and tools than the teacher librarian. Curation is a major element of Future Ready Librarians. Leadership in curation will be critical as schools scramble to vet, organize and leverage the coming flood of Open Educational Resources (OER) that represent the #GoOpen initiative.

Curation belongs in the curriculum. It should be part of your school's searching and scouting toolkit, part of your collection development strategy, part of your professional development plan, and part of your effective Web presence. In this webinar, Joyce Kasman Valenza, Ph.D., and Brenda Boyer, Ph.D., explored:

Possible new containers for "text" building

The best new tools for curating

Issues relating to OER silos

The role of student work in curation

Using curation as an effective strategy for scaling practice and making practice transparent.

Discuss and develop a plan for integrating OER and the #GoOpen initiative into local curation efforts. This session is designed for K12 librarians and administrators.
About the Presenters
After 25 years of joyful practice as a teacher librarian, Joyce Kasman Valenza joined the faculty of Rutgers University as an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the MI program where she prepares our future librarians. Joyce has worked in special, public, and school libraries.

Joyce is a Milken Educator, a Google Certified Teacher, and an American Memory Fellow. She was selected as one of Technology and Learning's 100@30, was honored with the 2011 Edublogs Award for Lifetime Achievement, and presented a TEDxPhillyEd talk at Wharton University.

For ten years, Joyce wrote the techlife@school column for The Philadelphia Inquirer. She has authored books on information skills for ALA Editions and Information Today, currently writes the NeverendingSearch Blog for School Library Journal and contributes to several other library and edtech publications. Joyce is active in AASL, ALA, and ISTE and considers herself one of the godmothers of #tlchat. Follow Joyce on Twitter @joycevalenza.
Join the SLC @ The Forefront community to network with educators, participate in online discussions, receive invitations to upcoming webinars, view past webinars, take a quiz to receive a CE certificate for a past webinar, and access free resources. WATCH THE WEBINAR RECORDING
Brenda Boyer recently completed her PhD in Instructional Design for Online Learning through Capella University. She has been an educator for over 25 years and is the Teacher Librarian at Kutztown Senior High School in Kutztown, PA, as well as the Chair of the Information and Technology Resources Department. Brenda also has instructed graduate students at both Kutztown University and Rutgers University. Her most recent journal article appears in the Nov/Dec, 2015 issue of Knowledge Quest. She is a co-author of the October, 2014, ALA Library Technology Report: Social Media Curation, Her research interests include online learning, embedded librarianship, and inquiry/research instructional models. Follow Brenda on Twitter @bsboyer.

Libraries Unlimited is committed to serving libraries by producing library science textbooks, reference works, practical handbooks, and professional guides of unparalleled quality.

For 60 years now, ABC-CLIO, LLC, has been recognized as an industry leader in the creation of innovative reference and professional development resources. Our four complementary imprints publish a comprehensive range of print and online materials that benefit learners, researchers, educators, librarians, and information specialists worldwide.

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OER: Issues, Possibilities and the Promise of Curation

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Presented by Joyce Kasman Valenza, Ph.D., Assistant Teaching Professor, Rutgers University, MI Program; with Brenda Boyer, Ph.D., Librarian, Kutztown Area High School Sponsored by Libraries Unlimited and ABC-CLIO WATCH THE WEBINAR RECORDING If you attended the live session, you'll be emailed a CE certificate within 24 hours of the webinar.

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Joyce Valenza's article discusses the #GoOpen Exchange, which was a conference focused on OERs in education, and the need for librarians to curate these sources. Her article also provides advice for how librarians can offer access to OERs and select the resources that are useful to their community.

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At the #GoOpen Exchange on Friday, everyone was talking about OER and the need to curate. The Twiter feed shows the buzz around the trending event and it shows school librarians were at the table.

As the initiative moves forward, it is critical for us to choose to be at the head of this particular table.

Hosted at the beautiful Skywalker Ranch, Friday's #GoOpen Exchange engaged major players in education from the White House and the DOE, as well as state officials, leaders of non-profits and learning institutions, the biggest names in e-commerce and technology, developers, vendors, publishers, state officials, administrators, leading folks in edtech, and educational thinkers and practitioners.

I was proud to be there to share along with some serious library power: AASL President Leslie Preddy, Mark Ray (WA) Washington, Jennifer Boudrye (D.C.) and Mary Reiman (NE).

Here's the good news: Our government edtech officials are convinced that librarians should play a role in curating the burgeoning number of open educational resources (they gave us several shout-outs and ensured we were there). We made an impact.

But it was clear to our little group, that to the larger majority of the participants, we were not even on the OER radar.

Some OER background:

Launched in October, GoOpen is a U.S. Department of Education campaign founded with the belief that

educational opportunities should be available to all learners. Creating an open education ecosystem involves making learning materials, data, and educational opportunities available without restrictions imposed by copyright laws, access barriers, or exclusive proprietary systems that lack interoperability and limit the free exchange of information.

What are OER?

According to the OER Commons:

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that you may freely use and reuse at no cost. Unlike fixed, copyrighted resources, OER have been authored or created by an individual or organization that chooses to retain few, if any, ownership rights. In some cases, that means you can download a resource and share it with colleagues and students. In other cases, you may be able to download a resource, edit it in some way, and then re-post it as a remixed work. .

OER include lesson plans and supporting scaffolds, handouts and workseets, courses, electronic textbooks, media, simulations.

Some more background:

In addition to our discussions and sessions, the #GoOpen Exchange included announcements about a few old favorite portals and the launches of new search tools, portals and services to facilitate discovery and use of OER.

Among the featured platforms and developments:

Microsoft is planning an app to help teachers and students find rated OER from within any learning management system. New features in Microsoft Office 365's Docs.com will allow users to create, discover, rate and share openly licensed materials.

Amazon Education unveiled a beta of its search tool for OER that will allow educators to upload, manage, share, discover and rate resources in an interface that closely resembles the familiar user experience of Amazon's massive marketplace. The site will feature left panel filters to refine searches. Just like in the commercial interface, users of education "store" will be invited to add ratings and reviews and will receive personal recommendations based on previous selections.

Edmodo announced the launch of Edmodo Spotlight, a haven for sharing, collecting, and discovering helpful resources all within Edmodo's global platform. Edmodo plans to offer tailored, vetted recommendations openly-licensed resources to every teacher on its free communication and collaboration platform. Spotlight encourages teachers to contribute. The new feature allows educators to discover OER even when not signed in.

The Center for Digital Education, Inquiry Schools and ISTE are collaborating to create a guide to selecting and using OER in schools, that will include: checklists, strategies and case studies drawn from #GoOpen districts.

The "classic" OER Commons now has a public library and Open Author allowing users to build OER, lesson plans, and courses-and then publish them, to the benefit of educators and learners everywhere.

By next fall, Follett will build an OER search tool, powered by the Learning Registry ( a DOE and DOD and White House-supported effort to create a repository of learning resource metadata) into the Destiny library management software. It will also offer the ability to create lesson plans and playlists.

Nader Qaimari, Executive Vice President and General Manager at Follett School Solutions, shared:

As we embark on GoOpen initiative, which can really transform learning, it's imperative that we keep the role of the librarian front and center. They are curation and edtech pioneers and are the best fit for propelling this movement forward. To champion their efforts, we are focusing on rebuilding Destiny to have more application in the classroom, fostering teacher and librarian collaboration around curriculum development, while also offering professional development to librarians to ensure they are Future Ready.

A call to action:

As this bounty of content enters our schools, this is a pivotal moment, friends. The mandate is to be ready and to take the lead in making sense of the content and resources that will be making their way into our schools in a big way.

The opportunity, especially for school libraries with little or no budgets, is to leverage this free content to promote access and equity, to create new user-friendly collections, and to embed the best into instruction school-wide.

We are going to need to ensure that our teacher partners can effectively search for and integrate the stuff they need. We will need to curate workflow tools as well as stuff.

As I shared in my panel presentation, Beyond Content: Engaging your Community as OER Curators, digital curation is simply a translation of traditional library services. It's our gig.

Curation is about selection, access, organization, equity. Librarians are have always been about (and translating): selecting, organizing, ensuring access & equity, sense-making, adding value, instructional voice, storytelling, personalizing and learning.

And so,

How will you curate to make the bounty of emerging portals themselves discoverable?

How will you select and curate instructional content to add local instructional value?

How will you ensure that your valuable existing purchases will be utilized along with the free content?

How will you work with teachers to understand the Creative Commons licensing behind the resources?

How will you build meaningful inquiry around these resources?

As a librarian, how will you translate your role and use OER to create and build and collaborate and contribute?

Get ready, 'cause here it comes.

An interesting aside, when the DOE's first open education adviser, Andrew Marcinek was a first year teacher, I was his librarian.

Another interesting aside, Sara Trettin, Presidential Management Fellow at U.S. Department of Education is a former teacher and librarian.

Update: You may be interested in this Symbaloo I pulled together listing OER portals and curating platforms.

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At the #GoOpen Exchange on Friday, everyone was talking about OER and the need to curate. The Twiter feed shows the buzz around the trending event and it shows school librarians were at the table. As the initiative moves forward, it is critical for us to choose to be at the head of this particular table.

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This blog post from Cool Tools for School explains the concept of digital curation and provides links for education on curating. It also explains tools teachers and students can use to select content and how it can be taught in the classroom.