Good repositories of Open Education Resources (OER) are starting to flourish at all levels. MERLOT is the de facto search engine for finding curated OER resources. George Mason University’s Masons OER Metafinder (MOM) is probably my current favorite. The Orange Grove is the Florida’s OER Depository. Ck12.org provides a find range of student support resources. More exhaustive listings can be found at the UW-Superior library and the Fort Hays State University library.
How do we keep the resources we find organized? For that we need to look to a range of curation tools. A few years ago a list of 26 curatorial tools started with Pinterest, which is effectively one of the most common basic curatorial tools. eLearningIndustry.com lists what it considers the top ten free educational curation tools. One of those is Diigo, which I think may be the easiest to use of its genre.
If you are questioning the best way to use these curation tools in schools, there are several good starting points. Teacher Challenge has a short 90 second video explaining electronic content curation along with several more videos and images at the site. Emerging EdTech provides nine ways to use content curation in the classroom. The eLearning Coach website has a brief article on how to build a site from curated resources.
As we continue to move toward multiple information sources whether to supplement or supplant traditional textbooks, curation tools will become more important for educators.
