Thing 8 Digital Curation

Thing 8 Digital Curation

Curation Situations: Let us count the ways July 5, 2017 By Joyce Valenza
I think that Joyce Valenza has some good ideas on the purpose of curating is collaboration as well as just putting a digital collection together. We build with our teachers that enables our students build knowledge. We need diverse collections that will also allow our students to become curators themselves, which is a integral part of the AASL Standards. Valenza and others have also talked about using OER Sources into our curations.

Are you a curator or a dumper? by Jennifer Gonzalez made me laugh because I know I do it and because we are librarians we want to share relevant information to others but often we fall short by “dumping” to much on a person and they immediately go into information overload because people can only process small chunks at a time.

My own thoughts on the Curator or Dumper…
This information overload is probably an issue that librarians cultivate , don’t hate me yet, but it’s just part of who we are. If you ask me about one book to read; you will hear about 10 books and all the ways I can book talk them to you. Ask me about why cows lay down when bad weather is coming and I will call Cornell Cooperative Extension, give you my neighbors phone nume who is actually a farmer as well as 13 books on Fact or Fiction in the animal industry, and it won’t stop there. I will email you peer reviewed articles and send you some incredible links to NOAA and actually will call my friend Bob at the news station who is a meteorologist and ask him about his point of view. By this time the person I am giving this information has spun their head around twice in both directions, asked for duct tape for my mouth and stared at me as if I really gave them too much information (like I would actually do that). Basically it comes down to asking questions about the specific information needs of a person and going from there with a plan to meet only those needs i order to curate efficiently. Don’t feel bad about being an information dumper; there are programs to change that. We can become super curators meeting the intellectual, emotional and amusing needs of our patrons.

Curation Tools
I tried Symbaloo but it would not be readily used by my students. I tried it before as a curation tool and it is only okay. I signed up for it again and for me it is too cluttered. I work better without having lots of things on my screen at one time. I could see some of my students using it to create their own resource lists to share with other students. Teaching curation is a skill that the students do need to learn. I would show my students two or three curation sites and let them choose But I am moving on in search of other tools.

I use Smore online flyer to share information to my students and one for my faculty. I limit how much information I put in it and I try to keep the focus on one or two topics. This seems to work well especially when I have something new such as Follett OneSearch to teach people.

The last program that I will try is elink.io which seems to be a cross between Smore online flyer and Google sites. This is a great Chrome Extension. When I needed to save a web page for elinkio I simply clicked the button and it also gave me opportunities to take a screenshot or to use an existing image for the web page. This can also be sent as a newsletter. I curated a page for LGBTQ+ students. I tried to include different media formats, eBooks and books and used local authors and people to help make connections for LGBTQ+.. I think I could easily teach elink to my students when they are collaborating on projects and because there needs to be more than just a works cited page for information. This curation and sharing will help my students find more meaningful information because they will be sharing it with each other whereas a works cited page is usually just seen by the teacher.
Here is my example of using elink.io
LGBTQ+

Thing 8 Databases, Sweet Search, Newseum

I used the NOVEL Gale NYS Newspapers for my government students doing their 3 page paper on current events. For some reason we are still having issues accessing it from my Library Webpage. I can create links but I cannot access it entirely from my page so I take what I need and put those links into Pathfinders for my students. It seems to work that way. Some of the kids used Gale because of the citation tool it has. Others found that they were not getting as much information as they wanted quickly. They also used Time Feed Burner, Huffington Post and Newseum. They found some articles on Newseum but went to other sites to find the articles because it was slow loading because when they clicked on the newspaper they had to click on the newspaper website and find the article they were looking for. I will also learn more about Beyond the Headlines in Sweet Search. So for my students working on current events I plan to use Newseum as a starting point next time just so they can see the news that  is out there beyond our small city.  

My students all use Sweet Search now as a research tool. I am going to try it next with my 11 grade American History classes. In Finding Dulcinea I found a 1970’s wealth of information for my next project. The web guides are great resources. I would recommend learning the awesome information in Sweet Search. It definitely works for my 7-12 classes.

Thing 8

I used Sweet Search with my 7th grade classes doing a project on drugs. The cool thing about this project is that there guided questions and each student must come up with 5 of their own wonder questions (it’s harder than it sounds). My pathfinder list was down so I had the kids go directly to Sweet Search after I modeled how to use it for them. The kids really were able to find reliable information at their level which as you all know is challenging.  The other part of using Sweet Search  I found the Newseum of newspapers. It’s like google fast flips were but a little more bulky to navigate through. I will be using it for current events for my seniors. They need to find three articles about one topic in different newspapews and write about it. So I am hoping that Newseum works as well as finding other information on Sweet Search.

Thing 8 SweetSearch

I am planning on using SweetSearch with a group of 7th grade students. my goal is to have them complete my check list with questions and a  bibliography sheet. I hope that by having the students focused on their topic I can guide them through the steps of using SweetSearch, which I love.  I have it planned out step by step for them on how to use information that is specific for their topic. I will let everyone know how it goes.

Thing 8 Sweetsearch

This is awesome. I just finished working on genetic disorders with three 7th grade classes. It was very difficult for them to find out what chromosome was responsibile for the disease/disorder. Many sites we found were to advanced for them and they had to read through many pages before finding their answer.  I tried finding chromosome numbers and disorders on Sweetsearch and it made my day. It makes researching so much easier. Here is the link that I added to my path finder: http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/chromosomes We had been using the NIH site but it is difficult to navigate, but sweetsearch made it easy for me to find a good site for the kids. Next week I we are doing drug research so I am planning on introducing sweetsearch to my students.

I took a brief look at Finding Dulcinea  which has awesome information about how to search the web. Once I spend some more time in it I WILL WRITE MORE ABOUT IT.

 

Thing 8 Databases

I have used some databases in my pathfinders for my students. The most important part is to teach the students how to search. I always tell them to narrow their search by clicking on full text so they don’t get too much inaccessible information. It is frustrating for the kids if they skip that step and think they have found the perfect article, only to find out that it is just an abstract. The next thing I show my students is that they can decide what format they want to search. They can choose video, blog, magazine, etc. For my stuidents it is challenging for them to be forced to narrow a search so they are not wasting time  like they do with bing or google. I rarely go over the lextile level as part of their searches, but I do show the students advanced search with key words. One important aspect is that once and a while the students have too narrow a search and have to expand their search. Students find it easy to copy the citation at the end of the article instead of having to figure it out for them selves.

They love the citation tools because it shows different examples on how to cite different types of materials. I usually have citation links on my pathfinders, but when students are using databases with the tool already in place it makes it easier for them to remember to put things in their bibliography.

One really useful feature of the citation tools is that one, it will cite the article in the proper way and they can use it without much effort on their part.