A brief overview of content curation on the web

Be specific about your topic. Make it clear and identifiable and ensure that collected items are relevant.

Via online media that is built in to the site you are using. Twitter, Facebook and Linked in are common options. This helps you to find an audience for your pins who then reciprocate by recommending and further sharing thereby creating a type of 'affinity space' around your topic.

Make sure that your collection is interesting but also user friendly. You can usually add descriptions and comments S well as tags to help your audience to find material on your site and to enable them to link out to the web to find out more about the piece you have curated.

Using social web tools such as twitter allows you to publicize your collection. This then builds a community around your topic when you post regularly. You need to follow others and they then recommend posts and collections to you based on your mutual interest. Be sure to reciprocate by publicizing and rep inning or reporting from those in your community.

The items that people recommend may challenge you to delve deeper into your topic and to consider new avenues. If students are using these sites it is a great way of teaching them about links between topics and relationships between ideas.

The more you leave comments on your posts the more your audience can understand your processes and the higher the level of interaction and dialogue. Followers typically leave comments so the more thought provoking your comments the deeper the level of dialogue. Make sure you occasionally ask questions or leave your followers with genuinely deep thoughts about your topic.

A small, and by no means definitive collection of ideas and sites to try.

This is a shot of one of my Scoop It pages. This site is a favorite because I can easily connect to a large audience, share to multiple sites and get recommendations from the site as well as other users and followers. It is very easy to use but a powerful and comprehensive solution.it is fully customizable.

This creates a newsletter type format which can be released according to a schedule. Many of the people I follow on Twitter use this site and post it there. It collects posts from their social media sites like Twitter and reports them according to the topic.

Designed especially for schools and teachers this site allows you to crate boards based around a topic. Others in the community can like posts and repost thereby increasing the chances of your posts being seen by others. This may be a good choice for teachers in PLTs.

A very popular site where users 'pin' items of interest. There is no limit on the number of boards but there are limited privacy controls. While you can have private boards the rest of the site is open. This may not be suitable for younger students. There is a limited facility for comments and interaction.

This is more a collection of binders that sit on the web. It is simple to use and you can install a bookmark let to allow you to collect items while you are browsing without the need to go back to the site each time. You can control how much access others have to your binders from view and copy to private. There is not the facility to connect with others but you can share them via social media.

This is currently in Beta but I included it because it is a beautiful looking product. It allows users to create magazine style pages of their collections and to share in the usual ways. At the time of writing I am not sure about how much community interaction this tool allows.

Curating a collection of quotes, images and works from other writers or poets may be a good way to provide inspiration and ideas for your students. They may even curate collections themselves based on a topic that they would like to write on. I am using this for the VCE AoS2,Context Technology and Communication on my Scoop It site where I aim to give ideas for writing as well as examples of different text types.

Students may find this a good way to gather material for their topics. Teachers could build tasks that require students to work collaboratively by commenting on and/or recommending material to their peers as well as collecting their own materials.

Using sites like Scoop It allows students to ask questions about their topic and to delve more deeply. Teachers need to scaffold tasks so that the focus is on the questions and the dialogue.

Curated sites can provide students with a space where they gather material that interests them and comment on what they think when they post.

Groups of students can co-author sites based on a chosen or given topic. They can set up expert groups to teach the class about their topic. Teachers need to check that groups are staying on topic and are commenting and interacting and that the work is equally shared and relevant.
Teaching tagging is important here and provides a lesson in semantic fields.

Similar to think alouds the sites can be used to provide inspiration. They still need to be relevant and organized.

Sites such as Noowit and Paper.li can provide a means whereby students create a class magazine. Teachers need to monitor sources carefully to ensure their appropriateness for a school setting.
Many sites allow twitter feeds as well as our own images and writing to be used.

This is only a very small set of ideas. There are already many sites set up to share and explore ideas about how content curation can be used in schools.