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"Teacher-Librarians." A Media Specialist's Guide to the Internet: Teacher-Librarians. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Feb. 2017.

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How important are libraries in elementary schools? by WBEZ's Afternoon Shift

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It's no secret that when funding goes for a elementary school, one of the first affected areas is the school library. A school with a dedicated library could end up with only a shelf in a classroom.

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Barack, Lauren. "School Library Budgets Rise 20%, Yet Challenges Remain | Spending Survey 2016." School Library Journal. N.p., 13 Apr. 2016. Web. 12 Feb. 2017.

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How is the librarian involved in the district planning for digital resources?

How is the librarian currently involved in the school and district planning processes?

Are there any areas of communication that need to be improved

Select 3 different resources that will give you resources for identifying and investing in digital resources.. Leave comments if you wish. Feel free to add other resources to this Padlet.

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Oddone, Kay. "Learning the Art of Digital Content Curation." LinkingLearning. N.p., 16 Mar. 2015. Web. 12 Feb. 2017.

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Waters, Author Sue. "Sue Waters." Sue Waters Blog. N.p., 13 Oct. 2013. Web. 12 Feb. 2017.

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Through digital curation we collect, manage and collate the best, most relevant content, on a specific topic or theme, for ourselves and share with others.

Using tools like Scoop.it, Pinterest, Diigo and Livebinders educators collect the best resources to put them into context with organisation, annotation and presentation.

This post is a summary of the ideas. tips and resources shared during my presentation for the 2013 Reform Symposium e-Conference on digital curation.

Digital curation in education

It's no longer just about creating content. We are living in an era of content abundance.

It's now about finding and putting content into a context, in a meaningful and organised way, around specific topics.

Using tools like Scoop.it, Pinterest, Diigo and Livebinders educators collect the best resources to put them into context with organisation, annotation and presentation.

Types of tools needed

There are two types of tools needed for curation ( watch Harold Rheingold's interview with Robin Good on Curation):

News discovery tools select and aggregate the content while the curation tools are used to display your content with context with organisation, annotation and presentation. News discovery tools are all about saving time by feeding you the most relevant content.

CurationTools

There are a gazilion tools you can use.; and which tools you use, and how you curate, is a personal as the tools you use to build your personal learning network (PLN).
Digital curation is a simple as:

1. Find the tool(s) that you prefer to use for news discovery and for curation.

2. Curate the content that helps you, and is helpful for others.

3. Make it part of your routine to curate and share content.

You can check out examples of the different tools used by educators to curate in our Digital Curation - use in education storify or share information on how you curate by participating in our Digital curation survey.

Check out Curation: The Next Big C by John Pearce.

My Curation tools

My main curation tools are: my blogs ( The Edublogger, Edubogs Teacher Challenges, Sue Waters); Flipboard; Pinterest; Storify; and Twitter.

Flipboard

Flipboard was originally designed as a social network aggregation, magazine-format app for iPad in 2010. It is now the most popular of the magazine-like content aggrregator apps for iOS, Android, Kindle and Nook.

Flipboard's strength is you are able to bring your social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, LinkedIn into one location alongside your favorite news sources and anything else you like to read, or watch (like YouTube) - all while making it easily to share your favorite content with your social networks and enabling you to easily curate your favorite content into Flipboard magazine(s)

Flipboard is one of my key news discovery and curation tools because:

1. It allows me to easily aggregrate content from a range of different sources.

2. Quickly curate and share articles I like directly to my own magazine from within Flipboard (or using the Flip It bookmarklet in your web browser) while also sharing the articles with with social networks at the same time!

Here's a quick video on how I use Flipboard magazines to find, curate and share content.

You'll find a complete step by step guide to setting up Flipboard here.

Pinterest

Pinterest is a pinboard-style visual booknarking website that allows users to create and manage visual content. You can share images or videos you find online, or you can upload images directly to Pinterest.

Here's some examples of our Pinterest boards:

Here's a quick video on how to use Pinterest.
Storify
Storify allows you to curate your own stories from photos, video, tweets, what people post on social media sites and your own narration.

I use Storify as a way of pulling information shared on a topic in Twitter into one locate where I can refer back to it later. For example. I asked my Twitter network to share "Do you curate? What tools do you use? Why you curate? Why you don't curate? Are you confused by what is digital curation?" and then pulled their answers into this Digital Curation - use in education storify.

Here's a quick video on how to use Storify.

What are your tips?

How do you curate? What advice would you give others on curating content? Is there anything I've included that you want covered in more detail?

Please tell us more about how you curate by participating in our Digital curation survey

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Digital Curation: Putting the Pieces Together

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Through digital curation we collect, manage and collate the best, most relevant content, on a specific topic or theme, for ourselves and share with others. Using tools like Scoop.it, Pinterest, Diigo and Livebinders educators collect the best resources to put them into context with organisation, annotation and presentation.

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TeacherCast. "15 Curation Tools for the Classroom | TechEducator Podcast 74." YouTube. YouTube, 10 Nov. 2014. Web. 12 Feb. 2017.

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15 Curation Tools for the Classroom | TechEducator Podcast 74

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The TechEducator Podcast is a weekly round table discussion about current topics in educational technology. For more information, please visit www.techeducatorpodcast.com. Many great ways to participate in the TechEducator Podcast. TechEducatorPodcast.com 1. Follow us Live on Video: http://www.TeacherCast.tv 2. Leave a Voice Mail: http://www.TeacherCast.net/voicemail 3. Email: feedback@Teachercast.net 4. Twitter: @TechEdShow (http://www.twitter.com/techedshow) 5.

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Schwartz, Katrina. "How Teacher-Created Free Online Resources Are Changing the Classroom." MindShift. N.p., 11 July 2016. Web. 12 Feb. 2017.

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Keeping information fresh and up to date in a quickly moving world is one of the biggest reasons districts are starting to get more serious about the power of teacher-created open resources. Districts typically adopt new textbooks on a five-year cycle. At that point, some of the information is outdated.

Another reason teachers like Langhorst are excited about this movement is the ability to adapt resources for their own use. If a teacher believes a lesson plan found online isn't completely aligned with the standards taught in his state, he can modify it until he's comfortable with it. And, textbook companies often tailor their content to the legislative priorities of big states like Texas and California -- where there are lots of schools -- essentially forcing teachers in other states to accept language around some ideas, like climate change and the characterization of different ethnic groups, that were approved by those state legislatures.

But many teachers still have big questions about OER that will determine how many of them choose to adopt this approach to teaching and curriculum. Teachers are familiar with the amount of time and energy it takes to create good learning materials because many already curate and remix lessons. As the infrastructure to search and share those lesson plans becomes more robust, some teachers wonder whether they should share lessons they created with the world when they were never compensated for the time they put into making them. Others worry about issues of intellectual copyright.

"You've got this potentially great lesson that you've created and you want to share it, but it's not a book or a song, something that traditionally has an author," Langhorst said. Instead, lesson plans are often mashups of articles, videos, photos and other media. Teachers are hesitant to share those lessons with their names attached because they know they don't actually own all the elements within it.

"I can't think of many things I do in the classroom that I can solely say I created or that I thought of," Langhorst said. He's also worried that some districts will pull back from textbooks as a way to save money (a lot of money), but won't reinvest those savings into the teachers creating curriculum or into professional development to help them use the new resources well.
GOING OPEN BY FOCUSING ON PROJECTS
Vista Unified School District, just north of San Diego, has been quietly transitioning to open educational resources through its focus on providing alternative paths to learning for students. For example, Vista Visions Academy allows K-12 students to attend school only half the time, while pursuing independent study at home through online programs.

In middle school, students come to a school building only three days a week. They get help from their teacher or peers, have advisory and complete lab classes. The other two days a week are done online. High school students take 90 percent of their classes online. Because of the unique structure at Vista Visions, teachers there have been using digital resources they curated for several years.

District leaders are also trying to support teachers to move more toward a project-based learning approach to teaching and away from traditional, textbook-bound instruction. As part of the process they are training teachers to curate and remix engaging lessons, paying them for their time while they're doing it. "We're trying to teach teachers to be discerning about what they're bringing to kids," said Erin English, Vista's director of blended and online learning.

She says this shift in professional development has translated to a change of instruction. A few years ago most teachers in a typical Vista Unified classroom were following a textbook, assigning a worksheet to practice a skill, and then doing an activity or writing assignment based on that lesson. Now, teachers who have had extra training are asking students to find their own information and use it to display their knowledge of the subject. Sometimes teachers will tell students where to find that information, but they are also trying to help students analyze their sources.

"It's getting teachers to understand that all students learn differently," English said. "We've been standardizing our instruction for years, but we haven't been very successful."

English said one big point of pushback from her teachers revolves around the time it takes to create materials this way. She understands it's a huge workload, which is why she's committed to paying teachers in her district who are working to create open educational resources.

"It's about giving kids current, relevant and timely material," English said. She contends that teachers can't teach their students to think critically about the world and the information presented to them if they learn from only one source while in school. Open educational resources can help drive home the point that there's always another opinion or a different perspective.

"We need to give [students] problems for them to solve themselves," English said. That's why she's so excited about a collaborative project Vista teachers created with teachers in Ohio and Wisconsin about how the earth affects people and how people affect the earth. The seventh-grade teachers at middle schools in all three states collaborated to build a unit of study that students in each class would do over three months. Students also collaborated with one another across state lines to give feedback, eventually presenting their final projects to one another through Google Hangouts.

"Students chose how they were going to display how they were going to master those standards through projects," English said. In the final products, students demonstrated their learning with everything from coding to making videos. One girl built her own smoke machine to simulate smog. English said the cross-state collaboration was particularly fun because students in different parts of the country had a lot of misconceptions about one another. Connecting over their projects helped them learn about different regions of the country.

"We have not done competency-based education, nor have we done a lot of open materials in our classrooms in a typical school," English said. Teachers involved in the collaboration were dipping their toes into a lot of new areas, but they felt safe doing so because the teachers in Ohio had much more experience with both project-based learning and competency-based education.

"For our teachers it was enlightening," English said. While the collaboration impacted relatively few teachers and students, the exhibition of the projects sparked excitement in other teachers to try something similar. The use of open resources trickled down into other classes that are now trying to use digital content they've curated as supplements to textbooks.

"Most teachers have been doing this for a really long time without publicizing it," English said. California teachers often feel particularly hamstrung by textbooks because of a court ruling in the Williams case that every child must have access to a textbook. The law came out of a class-action lawsuit meant to ensure equal access to clean and safe facilities and up-to-date learning materials for all California students. Practically, that means many district leaders feel they must spend huge portions of slim budgets on textbooks.

"Very few people haven't realized the gold mine of the internet," English said. That's why she's grateful the Office of Educational Technology at the Department of Education has been supportive of open educational resources through its #GoOpen push.

The Office of Ed Tech is supporting districts to #GoOpen in a few ways. First, staff members are trying to ensure that there is infrastructure in place to make teacher-created materials more discoverable. Amazon has brought its recommending and search prowess to the project with Inspire, a platform where teachers can upload their lessons, tag them and make them freely available to other teachers around the country. Inspire is still in beta, with several district around the country testing its functionality. The plan is for the Inspire platform to be compatible with third-party learning management systems that many schools already use, so teachers can search the learning registry from within their school's platform.

Another part of the #GoOpen initiative is to connect districts doing this work and encourage more to join. DOE staff have paired "Ambassador" districts with "launch" districts, like Liberty and Vista, so educators involved in this work can share information, best practices and learnings.

Lastly, the DOE recognizes that for many K-12 educators the OER space is new and a little daunting. Staff members are working to offer districts some guidance as they think about beginning to work more teacher-created and curated resources into their curricula.

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How Teacher-Created Free Online Resources Are Changing the Classroom

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Keeping information fresh and up to date in a quickly moving world is one of the biggest reasons districts are starting to get more serious about the power of teacher-created open resources. Districts typically adopt new textbooks on a five-year cycle. At that point, some of the information is outdated.

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See page 20 for OER searchable in Destiny Discover

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Valenza, Joyce, and Brenda Boyer. "OER: Issues, Possibilities and the Promise of Curation."EdWeb. N.p., 5 Dec. 2016. Web. 12 Feb. 2017.

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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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Connection, Author School Library. "From the Archives: Joyce Valenza on Digital Curation."School Library Connection Blog. N.p., 15 Dec. 2016. Web. 12 Feb. 2017.

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You're trying to access resources outside of your free SLC community. Get access to all resources found on this site through a School Library Connection subscription.

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Robertson, Nikki. "Content Curation and the School Librarian." Knowledge Quest (2012): n. pag. Nov.-Dec. 2012. Web. 12 Feb. 2017.

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Gwinnett County Public Schools, Georgia, published in 2015

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Amy Erin Borovoy (aka Video Amy). "Five-Minute Film Festival: Why Open Education Matters." Edutopia. N.p., 29 June 2012. Web. 12 Feb. 2017.

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Over sixty videos were submitted to the contest, and checking out just a few of them will help you understand what open education is all about. A panel of judges will choose winners and award cash prizes -- and there's also a Public Choice vote, open from now through July 11th. I myself am going to have a hard time picking just one to vote for -- so I've chosen a few of my favorites for this playlist. Go to the Why Open Education Matters website to vote for your favorite, or to see more! Winners will be announced on July 18th.

Video Playlist: Why Open Education Matters

Keep watching the player below to see the entire playlist, or view this playlist on YouTube.

1. The OERs - Open Educational Resources (02:37)
This lovely, colorfully animated video is reminiscent of vintage early sixties graphics. Produced by a team out of Venezuela known as "intheacademia." Vote for this video here.

2. Smashing Cameras - "Open Education Resource!" (Official Music Video) (02:42)
I can't resist giving props to the student band Smashing Cameras for writing and performing an original rap song about OER. Awesome. Vote for this video here.

3. Open Source Education - King Philip Regional High School (02:59)
Extra points for creativity on this highly dramatic video from King Philip Regional High School. Keep the fire of knowledge blazing! Vote for this video here.

4. Tavaana: E-Learning Institute for Iranian Civil Society (01:51)
This video by Iranian open e-learning website Tavaana makes the case that in some places, OER may offer the only access to quality free-thinking education. Vote for this video here.

5. Open Education Matters: Why is it important to share content? (03:32)
This video is also subtitled in Spanish, and features a fun animated story about the sharing of resources across the globe. Vote for this video here.

6. Why Open Education Matters
I have a soft spot for animation, and this one made me smile. A media company from Cape Town, South Africa called Blink Tower produced this cutie-pie explainer video. Love the characters and the happy tone. Vote for this video here.

More Open Educational Resources

While much of the Open Education movement is focused on higher education, with sites like Coursera, Flat World Knowledge, and Udacity offering free college courses and textbooks, and universities like MIT and Yale making their materials available freely online, there is also a wealth of places to find OER for the K-12 set. Here are just a few websites where you can start digging. You can also follow the #OER hashtag on Twitter.
OER for K-12

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Five-Minute Film Festival: Why Open Education Matters | Edutopia

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Over sixty videos were submitted to the contest, and checking out just a few of them will help you understand what open education is all about. A panel of judges will choose winners and award cash prizes -- and there's also a Public Choice vote, open from now through July 11th.

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"Open Educational Resources (OER): Resource Roundup." Edutopia. N.p., 04 Dec. 2015. Web. 12 Feb. 2017.

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Open Educational Resources (OER): Resource Roundup

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An educators’ guide to open educational resources with information about online repositories, curriculum-sharing websites, and sources for lesson plans and activities.

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1.  Does your selection and reconsideration policy include collection development information and processes addressing digital resources and tools?
2.  Are Open Education Resources included in your collection development plan?
Select 3 different resources that helps you answer the questions. Add comments/notes. Feel free to add other resources to this Padlet.