Oh, The Joy of Curated Resources!
When we first began to use online resources to identify learning tools that would compose Student’s school curriculum we were not surprisingly overwhelmed. It was exciting to realize that there were free resources available to meet any need for any topic at any level of learning. One resource led to another, information pills
and another. We entered web addresses in spreadsheets, implant
gathered them in Evernote notebooks, cialis used Zotero folders, BaseCamp projects, emailed them to one another, and generally became buried in a swirl of random links. Months would pass. Students would rediscover topics we had worked with before. We would remember that we had some cool resources for that topic, and then we would search for them, sometimes recovering them and sometimes not. Often we would repeat our search, but this time with a better idea of which sites offered reliable, interesting, relevant material.
We started to rely on a few sources, like YouTube, and KQED Ed Space, to give us a focus to all of this resource. But even then we had to carefully screen and research what we found, and frequently needed to combine several resources to get what we were looking for. We created playlists in YouTube and curated our resources there. But one day we gathered with students and set up the technology to share a video that we had placed on our playlist….and it had been removed. As any teacher knows, nimble creative thinking is essential to this job, so we moved on to another resource, and we probably found the same movie somewhere else after a few minutes of delay. Not ideal, but manageable. But wouldn’t it be better if we knew the source of our media and resources was reliable and legitimate?
But lately we have noticed the rise of organizations with websites that are curating these materials for us! What an incredibly necessary and useful role to play and an effective way to support busy educators. We still research, review, and assemble lessons, but the time spent wading through unreliable, inappropriate, or incomplete videos, lesson plans, documents, etc. is greatly reduced. We are able to create more cohesive lessons, with reliable multi-media resources more consistently. This shows in lessons that are relevant, up-to-date, and complete. Here are some of our favorite “Go-To” resources.
– PBS Learning Media
– Common Sense Media
– TED ED
– NYT learning Network
– Smithsonian Education
– Annenberg Classroom http://www.annenbergclassroom.org/
– Zinn Education Project
– History Channel Online
– NOVA Education
– NOAA Educational Resources
– “>Elementary Engineering Curriculum
– DIY.org
– Watch Know Learn
– KQED EdSpace
