Last year I delved into Thing 6: Curation Tools and ended up using LibGuides to curate resources for Black History Month at our school. Since then I've continued to use LibGuides to curate resources. However, while blogging about curation tools last year, I said the following: "Michelle Luhtala uses Destiny to curate much of her school library's content including student book review trailers. I would like to figure out how to use Destiny for curation because it is a tool the students are already using." Recently my Follett Destiny sales representative demonstrated a new curation tool to use within Destiny called Collections by Destiny. So, this year for Thing 6: Curation Tools, I decided to explore Collections and will use it curate resources on the rainforest for an upcoming 5th grade project. Then I will compare it to LibGuides. But first I read Joyce Valenza's SLJ article - "Curation Situations: Let us count the ways." Joyce inspired me with her reasons to curate and to teach curating: "Librarians are uniquely qualified to curate digital assets. . . . Digital curation is a translation and amplification of our traditional practice. . . . 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. . . . 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." Things I like about LibGuides:
Things I like about Collections by Destiny: It feels a lot like Pinterest. I think the format is visually appealing and comfortable for students and teachers to use. You can place "add to collections" on your browser bookmarks bar to quickly add resources to the collection. The resources show an image, a URL, a summary (sometimes) and tags. Things I don't like about Collections by Destiny:
Working on this project reminded me that all digital curation requires upkeep. I ran across many broken links when exploring OERs within Destiny Discover.
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Librarians are all about note-taking for research projects, so this topic caught my eye. I have played with Evernote a couple of times, but I just don't get into the habit of using it consistently. I save almost everything to my Google drive. However, I've never used Google Keep, so I am eager to read the Comparison Chart of Evernote, Microsoft OneNote, and Google Keep. I also hope to be able to show my students another way to take notes. Evernote and Microsoft OneNote are more robust according to the comparison chart, and PC Mag did not give Google Keep a good review comparatively speaking. However, I still wanted to try Google Keep because our school uses G Suite for Education with 1-to-1 ChromeBooks for the students. So I started out with 10 Basic Tips and Tricks for Google Keep. I started by adding the Google Keep extension to my Chrome browser. While in the Chrome Web Store, I spied another extension - "Category Tabs for Google Keep." I quickly learned the reason for this extension: Google Keep does not provide a way to collect notes in folders per se. This extension lets you associate the various colors in the palette with a limited number of categories or "folders" that you label - sports, grocery list, etc. To set up the color association, I had to go (on by Chrome tool bar) Window > Extensions > Category Tabs for Google Keep > Options. Things I Liked About Google Keep
Things I Didn't Like About Google Keep
I think it would be interesting to have students try to use Google Keep to curate all their notes on a research topic. They could use the different colors for subtopics (e.g., Rainforest - plants, animals, people, medicines, deforestation, etc.) as they would likely archive or delete the research notes after the project was done. The colors could be reset to new subtopics for the next project. I like introducing the students to Google Keep because they are comfortable using their Google account, and it's a real-world tool that won't go away when they change schools or the school decides to purchase a different app. Will the students be able to add the Google Keep and Category Tabs for Google Keep Chrome extensions or will I need to go through the IT department to enable that? How about the Google Keep app? Questions I will need to ask and answer. *Note-taking image at top of page: By Juhko (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons |
AuthorCarol Satta Archives
May 2019
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