Why is Digital Curation so Important for Educators in 2018?

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I’ve been working with schools, colleges and universities for nearly 8 years. Working to promote entrepreneurship and digital skills to make young people more employable and teach them how to innovate. Digital research is becoming increasingly important and educators and students need to know how to curate it.

The internet represents a fundamental shift in how educators and students learn and engage their coursework, gather information, and conduct academic research. We need to know how to do online research. From academic standpoint, digital research skills enable us to be better and more aware as learners. And on a larger scale, students who are digitally literate are more capable of making contributions to the world. Not only as professionals, but as people.

What is digital curation?

Digital curation is the act of finding and selecting, grouping and contextualising, preserving, maintaining, archiving and sharing digital content.

How does digital curation work?

We are all familiar with the amount of data we receive from a straightforward Google search; a multiplicity of videos, websites, blogs, research papers, news media, tweets, etc. with varying degrees of relevance for our purposes. Within this context, the digital curator is someone who can navigate the complexity of this information and find the relevant material for their purposes; who identifies patterns; groups and contextualises information to create new meaning; and who shares this with a wider audience.

It’s important in today’s digital age that Educators are digital curators who can find and share relevant information with their students. Educators have an abundance of resources and content that they would like to share with fellow teachers and their students. However, the challenge they face is figuring out how to efficiently organize all of their different sources of content into a coherent way that is easy to view. Digital curation, the alignment of curation with digital technology and participatory culture, is new and innovative, and provides opportunity for critical inquiry, a platform to demonstrate interpretative and creative abilities, and the potential for both faculty and students to develop digital literacies.

I’ve put together a list of the best tools for educators (and students) that make it easier to save, organize and share content and resources with students, colleagues, or whoever they like.

Flipboard
Flipboard is a magazine-like content aggregator that allows you to bring your social networks, favourite news sources and anything else you like to read, watch or listen to, all in one location. You can curate your favourite content into visually appealing Flipboard Magazines that are easy to share.

Price: FREE

Wakelet
Wakelet is a content curation platform that allows you to save, organize and tell stories with content from around the web. With Wakelet you can save articles, videos, podcasts, images, social media posts and anything with a URL, and organize them into collections/stories. You can add your own text and images to create a narrative around your content. You can keep your collections private, or easily share and embed them on your website, blog or social media – making it the perfect tool for collecting resources.

Price: FREE

PearlTrees
PearlTrees is a content storing platform that helps you to discover and save content in your own collection or drop zone. Add straight from their app or use their tools such as their web clipper, import, email and drag and drop. The website also allows you to search for content collections related to your own interests and discover articles and resources that other users have saved.

Price: Paid. 14 day free trial. From $2.99 to $9.99.

Scoop.it
Scoop.it is a content curation platform that lets you pick a topic and within seconds you are delivered relevant content. The content is curated by other users on the platform and offers suggested topics based on the most popular items.

Price: Free with paid options.

Diigo
Diigo is a social bookmarking tool that allows you to save and tag online content that you can easily refind. It also has a variety of social features that lets you share bookmarks with others and a collaborative feature that is very useful when sharing resources with groups, especially with fellow educators.

Price: FREE with premium options starting from $40 a year.