Managing the web – or as it’s become known ‘curating content’ – and controlling the flow of information available on the web is a fundamental digital skill we need to acquire to avoid being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of material out there on the web.
A recent IATEFL BESIG Weekend Workshop looked at this area in some detail. And Carla Arena, who gave the workshop on Content Curation, provided lots of very helpful tips for managing this flow of information.
A tool that Carla mentions that I use quite a lot for collating and sharing resources visually is Scoop.it. Here are some of the ‘Scoops’ I curate:
I occasionally run face-to-face workshops for teachers with the aim of helping them use technology more effectively in their teaching. I usually start by asking those present to get to know better and enhance one of the most important pieces of software on their laptops, namely their browser. Bookmarking and especially tagging new finds on the web, for example, can be an enormous time-saver in the long-run and offers another way more easily retrieving the resources we find online.
If you use Firefox, you can find help in the Mozilla support pages here: Bookmark Tags – Categorize bookmarks to make them easy to find. And for Google’s browser, there’s an explanation here: How to add tags to Chrome bookmarks. All the popular browsers have a tagging feature and the procedure is much the same for all of them. An alternative would be to use a social bookmarking tool such as Diigo, which also has tagging as a core feature. This tool also has the advantage of offering interesting professional development and teaching possibilities that you may like to explore. Here’s a video by a teacher in the States, for example, showing how he uses it in his teaching:
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