Curation Tools:
The way that I define curation tools is tools that are used to gather information such as pictures, websites, news articles, and so on. They are used to help organize the information into “folders” in order to construct neat ways to keep your information separated into categories. They are very helpful when you want to look at something but you want to save it to look at later, you can use a curation tool to hold onto it for later.
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Evernote is really a nifty tool to use in order to save websites and to have them all in one place. You can organize them into different folders and label them under different tags in order to find them easier. To the left, you will see some pictures of my Evernote. the first picture is of kind of the "home page" for my websites that I have saved. Here is where it would be useful to put tags on the websites so that you can sort through them faster. Also, there are many options on this page like sharing the website with others, favoriting it so it comes up on top, tells information about where you got it, etc. The next picture down shows my "notebooks", which are sort of like folders that are used to organize the websites into different categories. For example, I have all of my neurobiology websites in that category and my SMARTboard websites in another. This helps to keep things organized. This is a very helpful tool for teachers because it keeps track of all of the websites you need to save in one safe place. You can access your Evernote from any computer and in order to save the website, you click the little elephant that is on your tool bar (you can download it here) I would recommend this tool because it is extremely helpful and easy to use.
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Pinterest:Pinterest is a very fun tool to use if you are a person who enjoys crafts, cooking, decorating, learning new things, and so on. This is a great curation tool because it is able to keep all of the material that you find on this website in folders called "boards" so that you can refer to them later. So to start off, Pinterest is a fun website that comes up with lots of different things for you to look at. You can follow who ever you want or any organization that you want and you see what they post. The picture on the right is a screenshot of my home page, which is where it brings me when I log on. I follow a lot of food, inspirational, and craft posters. On the left is my profile. Here you see my "boards" that I talked about earlier. You can create these in order to keep track of the pins that you like and want to hand onto. For instance, you can see that I have a "Disney" board with "pins" of different interesting pins that I want to keep and continue looking at. The way you pin is you hover over a box that looks interesting to you and a little pin pops up. You click on that and decide which board (or folder) to put it into. This tool is very helpful for teachers because there are a lot of teaching organizations that post teaching ideas that help teachers with their lesson plans and implement their teaching.
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Flipboard:Flipboard is a very nice tool that helps keep track of articles and news that you would like to read in one spot organized in different categories. So what features are on here is that it asks you from over a hundred different categories what your interests are on and what you like to read about. From answering this, it auto populates your homepage with related stories according to your interests. The picture to the right shows my homepage that pops up right as I log on. For instance, the first article to come up is about nutrition, which was an interest of mine. At this time, I am able to save this article if I want to read this later. If I decide to keep it, I can click on it and add it to one of my "magazines" which acts just like a folder. On the left is my profile where my magazines are located. You can create any type of magazine you want in order to categorize the articles that you want to save. For example, I have a magazine called "astronomy" and right now I have articles in there about water on mars and new information about Pluto. It is a very easy tool to use and it is really nice to have a ton of different types of articles all in the same space. This is a great tool for teachers because you can read up on the newest information on teaching and being able to keep it in one spot.
CraftGawker:CraftGawker is a really neat tool that specifically focuses on the curation of craft ideas, so this is a really great tool for someone who is really into crafts. How this works is that you sign up and when you go onto the website, it comes up with a ton of options of types of crafts that you like, like crafts for teaching in classrooms, crafts dealing with shoes, crafts on restoring old clothes to make them look great, etc. After you click on some saying that these interest you, then they auto-populate on your page, just like the photo to the right. This photo is of my home page, where it puts up crafts that interest me according to the interests I put into the website. As you scroll through these, you will want to keep some to look at later. What you can do is click on them and save them to your profile. The picture on the left is my profile where my saved crafts are. As you save them, you can make notes and tags on the backs of them so that when you go back and look for them, you are able to find them based on the tag you give them or the notes that you write on the back. This tool is very useful for teachers because it gives them ideas about crafts that they can use in the classrooms in order to further the students' learning of certain topics.
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