curation

In my Technology Innovation class, we talked about curation and a few resources that assist users in collaborating with others and organizing resources. Two specifically that we talked about were Diigo and Feedly.

Diigo is a social bookmarking website launched in 2006, standing for “Digest of Internet Information, Groups, and Other Stuff”. Diigo allows its users to tag and bookmark web pages. This is a helpful resource because it allows for you to get easy access to these saved pages. It helps you to stay organized and you can share these resources with others. Diigo designed their app so you can save bookmarks through tags, which makes it easier for you to find the resources you are looking for later. For example, if you are researching about travel tips you can create a tag named travel tips, so then when you are wanting to see these resources you can go to the tag instead of looking through all your bookmarks. The bookmarking tool helps you stay organized and allows you to easily find your resources.

Another useful tool of Diigo is the highlighting and sticky note tool. The highlighting tool allows you to highlight important parts of a text directly on the website. Highlighting is helpful for you to remember which parts of the text you thought were important and were wanting to remember, and also to share with others and show which parts you wanted them to see. The sticky notes tool lets you add notes, comments or reminders directly onto the webpage. This is another great feature that is very useful for both the user and for collaborating with colleagues, students, peers, etc. As a university student, both of these features would be extremely helpful to me for researching and collaborating with my peers.

Diigo is a great tool for curating, organizing bookmarks, highlighting text, adding sticky notes of information to web pages and collaborating with others.

The other web tool we discussed was Feedly. Feedly was released in 2008 and was created to be used as a news aggregator and to help you discover insightful sources. Meaning it finds similar news feeds from various online sources and groups them together for easy access and viewing. The user can then customize this and share their sources with others. Feedly has an app that is available on both iPhone and Android making it accessible for many people. It is a great tool to discover many useful online sources, such as news publications, blogs, and youtube videos. Feedly allows its users to organize their work and collaborate with others.

Feedly is another great curating tool that allows you to discover sources in an organized and customized way and to share with your teammates.

All in all, I learned a lot about curation and gained two great resources to help me organize sources and collaborate with my peers. These will be useful applications for me to use in the classroom.

Diigo’s website: https://www.diigo.com/

Feelys website: https://feedly.com/i/welcome

In my Technology Education class, we went on a school visit to observe Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry. It is a newer high school in Victoria, that offers a personalized education. This school has been operating for six years and has 85 students attending. It is a private school, but the tuition is more affordable than most private schools. PSI does not want to create more schools, but wants to be a model to other schools and hopefully show them that they can do it too.

At this school, they focus on inquiry-based learning, where students are told they can ask anything. Their inquiry process is to find an initial question then do some research and from that research create a better inquiry question. These inquiries can be anywhere from a week long to a year long. The staff recommends doing three inquiry projects at one time, so students stay engaged and always have something to do. The inquiry process is a lot of build, make, try and experiment, not just research. The students have the opportunity to go work with the community and get hands-on experience. For example, one year a student wanted to learn about boat building, so they worked with a boat builder for one year. I think this is a really cool idea and allows the students to get a good hands-on experience, which is valuable to find your interests.

The learning design is much different than most high schools. They do not test at this school, they put learning in the student’s hands and their success is based on their engagement. The learning environment is meant for the students to succeed, they want there to be a joy in learning for the students. The students build there own daily schedules to be what they want to be working on and can include breaks to go get some exercise etc. A tablet is used to sign in and out that says where they are going and when they will be back. This allows students the freedom to leave when they want to better their learning process. They still have report cards, as it is needed to go onto university or college, so the teachers meet three times a year to put students inquiries into courses – subjects are integrated within each other and their inquiry questions.

I personally have never been to a school like this. It was a very cool experience to get to go observe it and it gave me, as an aspiring teacher, a different way of looking at learning. I really like how PSI puts learning in the student’s hands and allows them to research topics they want to know more about. I think this ensures the student’s engagement into school and is of value to them in their future. I am happy I got to experience this school as it gave me a lot of ideas that I could implement in my classroom to create an effective and engaging learning environment.

PSI’s Website: http://learningstorm.org/

elissahalliday

Curation – Diigo and Feedly

Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry School Visit